salesscale.com

(Check out this cartoon illustrating how customer expectations can quickly and dramatically veer off course)

Setting good expectations in sales and tightly managing  scope in services sounds like a great way to fix misaligned customer expectations.  

Much easier written than done.

And it's a good start, but does miss a key piece of the puzzle.

As a 3-time VP Sales selling technology solutions to business people, I've spent a lot of time hearing from from the service team how my reps need to set better expectations during the sales cycle.  Services often has a point.  And so I've spent a lot of time more precisely productizing service offerings,  tightening up statement of works, including members of the service team in the sales cycle, creating tools and infrastructure to address the issue and working with reps to be as clear as possible about the what's and the when's.

But none of that addresses the often surprising - and harder to manage -- culprit of customer internal communications. 

Getting the clear solution 'thought bubble' from the reps mind into all the buyers she deals with during a sales cycle is difficult but doable.  The tricky part is when the buying team turns to their implementation / operations / user team - many of whom have not been part of the sales cycle - and tells them what to expect.

The "thought bubbles" that form in these folks minds are of course filtered by what they all want.  They typically aren't spending a lot of time analyzing every last word of your semi-detailed and semi-well written statement of work.  And they have no incentive to expect less than exactly what they need  - regardless of what your solution actually does or what the original scope of the deal is.

Where you might have some "thought bubble" expectation inflation between the rep and the buying team, you often see "thought bubble" hyper-inflation between the customer's buying team and their internal execution team.

And when the client's internal team -- who incidentally are managing the day-to-day implementation -- starts to ask for all kinds of crazy stuff, the services team starts casting the 'stink eye' towards the sales floor.  They suspect that sales must be the source of these crazy expectations.

In fact, sales often isn't. 

Focusing on the sales / service handoff is a great place to focus and deliver sales tools to help tighten up the expectation gap.  And tools like customer welcome letters, sales / service handoff meeting agendas, new customer kickoff agendas, sales / service internal kickoff agendas and  customer relationship and results scoring tools can help (see "The Sales Service Handoff" in our sales resource library).

Training everyone on the sales and service team to be aware of the potential for hyper-inflated "thought bubbles"  and immediately addressing them when they surface is important.  Not immediately resetting these expectations when they are first articulated confirms the client's feelings that these are the right expectations.

This means that the service team trusts that the sales team hasn't set wrong expectations.  Which means that the sales team needs to set the right expectations.  It also means that the service team knows how to gently say "no" and knows when to escalate things within the clients and their own companies when necessary.

Also all things much easier written than done.

Tom Lavey, Sales Scale Partners

I'm happy to introduce Tom's first post.  I had the pleasure of working with Tom both at Oracle when he was building out its application sales organization and then again when he was on my board of advisers at Nimblefish.  Tom is a leading expert in target marketing strategy, sales models, value pricing strategies, negotiation and just plain old selling!   He is one of the very few software folks who has driven over $1BB of software sales and he has done it through all kinds of economies so his thoughts on selling in this recession are particularly interesting.

Seven Changes to Make on a Rainy Day

You bet. It's time to buckle up. Change the way you do things. Take advantage of what you have and start improving your bottom line today. Polish the car and get it serviced instead of buying a new one. Paint the house instead of moving. Focus on local festivals instead of traveling to new continents. In other words, take this time to re-examine what's real today. Fix it. Make it better. Benefit from it.

If you are in business today you have customers, real live people who depend on your product to get their work done. You have a market that works. It may be soft, but you know that it works. Under normal conditions the organizations in those markets need your solution. So why not take this time to capitalize on your existing customers and re-sell into your market? Polish your organization. Re-paint your product. Focus on your market. Stay home.

Capitalizing on the elusive "Network Effect"

Many promises were made (perhaps by YOU) about "viral marketing" or the "network-effect". It was supposed to give you more customers automatically, at low cost of sales because your customers would introduce your product to their customers (or suppliers) and they would introduce it to THEIR customers, etc. etc. until you magically had 80% market share and zero cost of sales. That didn't happen, did it? Why it didn't is the key to revitalizing your company.

It has failed because of challenges that you haven't addressed:

• Real product adoption within your customers takes more work than you've given it.
• "Supply chain collaboration" is harder than it sounds
• Your sales organization is not set up to sell to your customer's customers or suppliers.
• Your marketing and partnering efforts were not re-engineered to make it work

Take this time to change your organization and capitalize on what is real - your current customers and your market. Following are seven easy steps to help you get there.

1. Change how you measure Customer Support and Services.

Today, most customer support and professional service teams are measured on customer satisfaction. You should measure how many current users are using the product - including the new modules and features. Do your current customers need more users? Not until everyone who could use it does use it.

I had a team at a large telecommunications company, and they were measured not just on the "smile meter" of customer satisfaction, but on moving adoption from group to group.  In two years we went from a pilot of 300 users in one product organization to 8,000+ users spanning five teams. The lesson: satisfaction is nice, but adoption is the prerequisite of success.

2. Change market research to account research.

It's time to stop talking about vertical market strategies and focus on specific account strategies. Examples:

• To make the network-effect work you need a map of the network. Map the supply chain of your customers account by account. Look for multiple points of influence. Find a supplier to four or five of your key customers and you'll find an interested prospect.
• Research changes in the executive ranks of your customers and your targeted prospects. My experience is that almost all new initiatives that involve significant technological investment occur within 6 months of one or more new key executives joining the company. After all, they were recruited because change was needed. Use this as a key indicator.

3. Change the way you work with your customers.

To make the network effect work requires involving your customers. Get a letter of introduction from individuals at your customer that you can use as a door opener at their relationship accounts. Perhaps you'd like to involve them economically by giving them a "finder fee" for helping you get business. But be careful and clever about what you offer.

 

Remember it is real people who will help you so the incentive should help them personally (but not directly in their pocket)! It should be something of value that helps them get their job done better or use your product better. Offer incentives such as additional licenses, training credits, or trade show and conference passes, etc. If you simply offer the customer a direct "fee" it may not go to person's budget who helps you and therefore is of less personal value.

4. Change sales "territories".

Almost no sales model I've seen is set up to take advantage of the network effect. Say your large New York customer in Banking could give you great leads into several medium sized printers in Chicago. Well guess what? They're in the wrong vertical, in the wrong state, and they're the wrong size account.

 

How in the world do expect the New York large account Banking team to pass on the lead to the Midwest mid-market printing and publishing team? Change the rules to make this work or it won't work. Let sales teams follow the network by registering their "network" or provide incentives and credit for involving other teams. This requires creative territory compensation plans but to ignore it is to insure failure of the network effect potential.

5. Change the Compensation Plans.

Today almost every software company I talk to is experiencing lower initial size deal size and longer sales cycles. Companies want to be sure that the software will work and really be used before they invest. Even renewals with existing customers can require rejustification. Changes you can make right away:

• Pay reps a higher rate for paid pilot programs. The dollar amount of the transaction may be low but it's the best proof that a customer is interested and will move forward with proven success.
• Pay reps for renewals. Two years ago they were automatic. Today they have to be earned.
• Pay "new account" bonuses. New customers are smaller in initial value today but you'll need them to grow your business. Make it worth the sales reps' time.

6. Change how product development prioritizes new features.

This is simple. Customers are your number one priority. If your customers are happy, you will be introduced to new prospects (network effect), you will make more money on maintenance renewals, and you will improve adoption for enterprise-wide deployment. So, how do you make your customers exceedingly happy? Include them in the development process. The old strategy may have been to include just enough customer feature requests to mollify them. Today this just isn't good enough. Instead of spending only 20% of your development efforts on your customer's needs, and 80% of your time on new technology or new markets, flip it around. After all, you are relying on them to get you through these soft times.

7. Change the success criteria for partners and partner programs.

A partnership is no longer successful just because it made your website. You can have a list of 100 partners, but if they aren't aligned with your new strategy, it just won't help the bottom line. Use the network effect with your partner's customers. Include them in your network effect territory planning. Hold them responsible for adoption. Include them in development meetings. Partners are a resource, but they must treated as an integral part of your organization or they are just taking up resources across the company - resources you no longer have.

This is not the first down market . The cardinal rule has always been you must survive before you thrive. Just cutting costs (and headcount) is not sufficient. You must be creative and inventive. Those who recognize this as an opportunity will make significant changes to their organization, continue to improve the bottom line and be better prepared when the rainy day is over and the sun starts to shine.

Tom Lavey at Sales Scale Partners is currently a Sales and Business Strategy consultant for young companies like Transcepta, Birst, Retail Solutions, and Nimblefish,. Tom has been recognized as a national leader in sales management and sales strategies for enterprise technology solution companies.

He has grown startup organizations to over $50mm and $50mm organizations to over $300mm in revenue.Tom has developed and implemented go-to-market strategies for companies such as Taleo in workforce logistics, MS2, in product lifecycle management, Extricity in B-to-B commerce, and I2 in supply chain management.

From 1994 through 1999, Tom was vice president of North America application sales at Oracle Corporation and previously was CEO of Minx Software. Earlier Tom was COO of Ask Computer Systems.

This post is the 5^th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities. 

This client success scorer was also developed for a high-ticket, consultative sale and spans both the sales cycle and the ongoing account management relationship.  It tracks the strength of the relationship with the client and the results delivered.  The purpose with this tool was not to qualify or disqualify accounts but to realistically measure how well we were doing at the account and how to make retention and expansion more likely.

The ‘relationship strength’ section is somewhat similar to the fit / winnability tools discussed above with its tracking of initiative priority, contact level, budget size and competitive environment. Additionally, it tracks how the client awards additional business, from an RFP process (weakest relationship) to a verbal ‘give me a bid so we can move forward (strongest relationship).’ 

Another good indicator of relationship strength tracked here is how often strategic reviews are scheduled.   These reviews were face-to-face discussions with the executive sponsor about current project status and future project ideas.  Annual or bi-annual reviews was our target but something we hadn’t earned or asked for at all our customer accounts.

The ‘client results’ section first tracks the annual value created for the client.  Obviously, if you can quantify and get agreement around strong results, retention and expansion are easier.  We also scored solution usage (multiple divisions?), solution depth (multiple solutions?), and renewal status (from “no” to “automatic”). 

We felt referenceability was linked to results because if a client was agreeing to be a reference for sales, or, even better, for national pr / marketing / advertising campaigns, they were getting strong value from the solution.  We also tracked the professional success of the individual buyer  -  did the results from our solution make them a company star (strong)?  Did it get them promoted (stronger)?  Did they parlay it into a best practice industry leadership role (strongest)?

There were 30 points possible from both the relationship and the results sections and we carried the scores on our account management plan.  You’ll also notice that the 2^nd tab on the spreadsheet shows a relationship-results scorecard for 5 accounts.  We used it as a group at a sales / service kickoff to assess how strong our relationships and results were.  It was an eye-opening exercise and made us realize specifically where our relationships and our results could be stronger than they were.

This tool was borrowed from the management consulting industry and implementing it was trickier in the tech model where – unlike the partner-model in consulting - sales and service rolled up into separate VPs.

We were a little too new-business focused and immature for this tool to deliver its full impact but I think it’s a good one for a company with a consultative solution where much of the growth comes from existing client expansion.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

• Simple Opportunity Scoring (medium average selling price (ASP), spreadsheet)
• Winnability Scoring #1 (low ASP, Salesforce.com)
• Winnability Scoring #2 (medium ASP, Goldmine)
• Sales Resource Prioritizer (high  ASP, spreadsheet)
• Client Success Scoring (high ASP, spreadsheet)

This post is the 4^th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  This was for a solution with a higher average selling price.

 

This sales cycle was a high ticket (ASP > $1M) create demand sales cycle where we needed to be smart about continually assessing fit and winnability because it was a long and resource intensive sales cycle: creative, technical and client services people were needed in every sales cycle in addition to an executive sponsor and the sales people themselves.

We had enough reps but not enough of these other folks (who also had day jobs outside of the sales cycle) to work all the opportunities.  We needed a fair and generally understood way of disqualifying opportunities because the ad hoc refereeing of resources at the sales meeting was not working well.

We tracked 2 phases of fit in a simple spreadsheet with this sales resource prioritizer.

Phase I ranked early sales cycle information that could be figured out through research and a 1^st call.  Here we ranked things like vertical market attractiveness, alignment with CEO initiatives (determined from annual reports or transcripts from investor calls), size of marketing budget, year over year sales growth (we had better success selling to greed than fear and so winners were more likely to buy our solution),  and our internal coach’s level in the prospect organization.

Phase II was the gate to delivering a full solution presentation to an account.  It ranked information that could be gleaned through a discovery phase.  It included where our solution fit priority-wise for our line-of-business VP, how strong the solution fit was, how many competitors and how committed the prospect was to a joint evaluation process.

This is a good approach to qualifying resource-intensive sales opportunities and efficiently focusing sales-support resources on the most winnable deals.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

• Simple Opportunity Scoring (medium average selling price (ASP), spreadsheet)
• Winnability Scoring #1 (low ASP, Salesforce.com)
• Winnability Scoring #2 (medium ASP, Goldmine)
• Sales Resource Prioritizer (high  ASP, spreadsheet)
• Client Success Scoring (high ASP, spreadsheet)

This post is the 3^nd in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  Here we had a medium average selling price and this scorer is integrated into Goldmine.

I used a simpler approach to ‘winnability’ tracking with a sales force that hadn’t been using opportunities to track deals.   They were selling into an emerging market so a combination of solution fit and the ‘desire to buy anything’ was a good proxy for ‘winnability’ -- our competition was prospect inaction vs. specific competitors.

Many of the reps came from relationship sales backgrounds (versus solution selling backgrounds) so once they had client interest, standard operating procedure was to send out a quote and hope for the best while they used a combination of charm and persistence to try and forge a friendship.

But in fact, they were often engaged in a ‘create demand’ sale with multiple buying influences and a product that had an implementation period of a few months. Placing all their chips on a typically low-level friend in the account wasn’t helping drive the opportunities and so there were many stalled accounts. To win more consistently, they needed to add more value during the buying process and also qualify opportunities better by asking the right questions and talking to the right people.

To help track winnability in addition to the standard opportunity completion stages, we set up a single

winnability field on the opportunity to track the fit (three stages taking you from 10% - 30%) and likehood of the prospect buying anything (4 stages taking you from 40% - 90%).

Looking at the winnability ‘fit’ values, ‘client interest’ as a 10% winnability percentage reminded the reps that there was more work to do.  Being in our  target market or, if not, scoring more than 20 points on a fit calculator (similar to the simple opportunity scorer discussed above) got us to 20% winnability.  The third fit question – strong business value – addressed value delivered to the prospect.  We kept this as a conversation point versus a score sheet but the reps were expected to know why our solution was materially important to the prospect’s business.   You needed to have all three of these fits to continue working the deal.

We had three winnability ‘why buy anything’ factors – compelling event (CE), strategic mentor (SM) and budget created (BC) – that didn’t always happen in the same order or at all. 

We could win without a compelling event or a strategic mentor, but we had less control and those were less predictable sales cyles.  We defined a compelling event as ‘something bad happens if they don’t do this project by a certain date’.  We defined strategic mentor as ‘someone who can tell you if you really are winning.’

We were often creating demand, so it wasn’t unusal that we had to manufacture budget for our solution during the course of the sales cycle.  Therefore, it often happened later in the sales cycle than identifying (or creating) a compelling event and recruiting a strategic mentor.  But not always  - sometimes there was a specific budget when we arrived.  So you’ll notice that these three winnability factors are each worth 20% points and can be selected in any order.  All three of these would get us to 80% winnability.

Our opportunity completion cycle and winnability cycle converged at the same 90% final step – contract redline.  Once the prospect spends legal time redlining your contract, you are close to both completing a sales cycle and winning.

This approach worked well to reset expectations and establish what it really took to be in a position to consistently win business.  Along with prospect education, industry best practice sharing and coaching our champion, this approach helped our relationship-oriented reps evolve towards being solution-focused reps.

(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

• Simple Opportunity Scoring (medium average selling price (ASP), spreadsheet)
• Winnability Scoring #1 (low ASP, Salesforce.com)
• Winnability Scoring #2 (medium ASP, Goldmine)
• Sales Resource Prioritizer (high  ASP, spreadsheet)
• Client Success Scoring (high ASP, spreadsheet)

This post is the 2^nd in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  Here we had a low average selling price and were using salesforce.com.

Many salesforces equate how far along they are in a deal with the probability of winning that deal.  So, the qualification stage might be a 10% probability of winning and the contract negotiation stage might show an 80% probability of winning.

There is logic to this approach but it is one-dimensional.  You may be at an early stage with a prospect who has bought from you at their previous company and have a high likelihood of winning or be at a later stage in 3^rd place with a very low probability of winning. 

Stage completion probabilities also suffer a timing problem when used for pipelines and forecasts– what happens when you have completed most of the opportunity stages – say you’re 80% complete  -- and although you are confident you will win, there is a good chance the deal will roll into next period?

Do you sandbag by changing the close date to next period and try to bring in the big surprise this period?  Do you leave it in this period but detach the stage probability from the stage itself and use it to show the probability of winning this period vs. winning at all?  If you take this approach, how do you track general winnability?

In a perfect world, you’d want to measure multiple dimensions of winnability, like how far you are in the cycle, how likely the prospect is to buy anything and how likely they are to buy from you.

In emerging markets where the competition is small and fragmented and doesn’t show up regularly in every deal, tracking how good the fit is and how likely the prospect is to buy anything can be a good proxy for how likely you are to win. 

This scoring tool example is an example of scoring both fit and how likely a prospect is to buy anything.  This was done in Salesforce.com and, like the first example, has 10 questions.  These are carried both at the lead and (shown here) opportunity levels. 

There are some ‘table stakes’ questions that didn’t score any points but are critical to a good fit that could be answered after an early qualification call – like ‘do they primarily sell with a direct sales model?’ and ‘is new account business important to their sales effort.’

Other questions like ‘is there a compelling event?’ or ‘have we spoke with the line VP?’ typically took more time to understand and execute.  An example of a proxy for ‘will the prospect buy anything’ was ‘how long have they had Salesforce.com?’  We found that companies that had Salesforce.com longer were more likely to be aware of its shortcomings and so further appreciate our product.

While the table stakes questions were not scored, the others were.  Six were equal to 10% and the main correlator was worth 30% so there were 90% winnability points possible.  The reason we used percentages and a total of 90% points here was so we would could look at this number in conjunction with the opportunity stage completion percentage and easily compare them.

This scoring approach is valuable for multiple reasons.  It quickly flags differences between the winnability and opportunity stage completion numbers.  If you are at an 80% opportunity completion stage and you show only a 20% chance of winning, it is worth a conversation with the rep about fit and tactics.

Secondly, this winnability dimension helps handle the pipeline / forecast timing issue outlined above.   It lets you detach the stage completion probability from the stage itself and tie it to the period you are in without losing the longer view of how winnable the opportunity really is.

(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

• Simple Opportunity Scoring (medium average selling price (ASP), spreadsheet)
• Winnability Scoring #1 (low ASP, Salesforce.com)
• Winnability Scoring #2 (medium ASP, Goldmine)
• Sales Resource Prioritizer (high  ASP, spreadsheet)
• Client Success Scoring (high ASP, spreadsheet)

This post is the 1st in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities. This tool was developed for a low average selling price solution ($30K) on its way to a medium average selling price ($100K+).

 
Getting your sales team to focus on winnable opportunities can be a challenge. 

I’ve spent my career selling technology but had an interesting conversation on the topic of focusing on attractive and winnable opportunities with a friend outside the industry the other day. 

He works at a mid-sized engineering firm and several folks – including the founders – are responsible for selling new business.  It turns out that only one of the new business folks (a non-founder) sells profitable projects.  Even though it costs $25K+ to work up a bid, no discipline is used to figure out where their firm adds the most value and where they are most likely to win.  So they ‘quote and hope’ and lose a lot of proposals and win a lot of unprofitable business.  But they don't know any other way.

This is not unusual.  I’ve walked into this situation many times at technology companies. I’ve seen the problem with inside sales forces selling SaaS offerings with low average selling prices ($10K / year), with field sales forces selling on-premise licensed software with high average selling prices ($1M) and with everything else in between.

I’ve found it is actually quite easy to come up with 5 – 10 questions that help reps focus on the right opportunities.

Over the next five posts I’ll walk through different variations on this theme and show you five best practice tools I’ve used to keep my reps focused on the right opportunities:

• Simple Opportunity Scoring  (medium average selling price (ASP), spreadsheet)
• Winnability Scoring #1 (low ASP, Salesforce.com)
• Winnability Scoring #2 (medium ASP, Goldmine)
• Sales Resource Prioritizer (high  ASP, spreadsheet)
• Client Success Scoring (high ASP, spreadsheet)

Simple Opportunity Scoring

Growth companies don’t always clearly define focused target markets, thinking that focusing on specific markets would be limiting and compromise growth in light of their horizontal solution and its wide appeal.  And, of course, all these horizontal prospects have the same basic problem and so the same basic solution makes sense – who doesn’t want to fish in a bigger pond?

One reason is that sales reps –   spurred on by core character traits like optimism, creativity and perseverance – often feel like they can win anything if they apply enough grit.  And they will certainly supply a lot of heartfelt talk every Monday morning at the sales meeting about why their deal is a great fit even though it is quite different than any current customer implementation.

And the rep will win some of these outlier deals, help make a quarter and sometimes even open up a new, viable market for the company.   Everyone is happy.

More often than not, though, these deals where the rep is transposing value delivered on the fly are lost.  And when they are won, it often turns out that the solution needs a few tweaks because it’s actually a little different in the new industry -- service scrambles, development scrambles, the rep starts to get calls from the new customer, the customer’s not refereanceable yet, the new market is not necessarily that attractive, etc.  Now everyone isn’t quite so happy.   

Abdicating market management to sales reps is not a great idea.  Sales reps need guidance in figuring out and focusing on those opportunities that are most attractive and winnable.

Short of getting full target market alignment from the management team and having a well-honed marketing team that is disciplined in delivering targeted leads, there are some easy sales tools a sales manager can use to help your reps focus on the right deals.

Here is an example of a scoresheet I used to rank new opportunities with reps at a small software company that was wasting a lot of time pursuing random stuff.  There are ten qualification questions, each worth 2 points, so a 20 point score would be a perfect fit.

For this company, a prospect got ‘fit’ points if it was in the most penetrated market, near headquarters, had a need that matched our easiest-to-deliver solution, if its business had a high average selling price, if our primary contact was highly placed, if it was big enough to afford the product, if we delivered high value, if we could get a decent size starter deal and if there was a good expansion opportunity.

This tool was designed so all the answers, or proxys for the answers, were easy for the rep to figure out.  If the rep didn’t know the budget for our product category (direct marketing, in this case), we would use 1% of annual revenue.  This helped us see that typically we needed prospective with a minimum of $50M in annual revenue. 

We had a simple value calculator to determine the value we delivered at an account that any rep could use and so on.

There were three scoring outcomes: work the deal, walk from the deal and evaluate case-by case.  The most valuable category was ‘walk from the deal’ unless determined strategic by the CEO.  We would review deals during the 1:1s and were able to quickly eliminate a lot of the losers with minimal fuss from the rep.

We would attach the spreadsheet to the opportunity in our CRM system.

Practically speaking, going through this exercise a few times with each rep helps change behavior. It is a good tool to keep around to ramp up new reps

Also, this tactical deal-by-dealing scoring approach can eventually help lead the company to a target vertical market.

Sales reps are typically more mobile, work with more external contacts and draw on a broader base of internal support than the average employee.  This leads to a surprising amount of infrastructure that a sales rep needs in addition to the standard computer, phone, voicemail, employee phone list, business cards etc. that all employees need. 

Understanding all the pieces and getting the rep fully set-up in their first week is important for a fast rep ramp and is tricky because rep set-up can get lost in the cracks between sales / sales operations, HR, IT / telephony, development, and office management.
 
Having a new rep checklist that includes all the pieces across all the functions with the owners and the delivery dates noted is a good way to get a handle on this situation.  I started such a checklist a few companies back and have been adding to it ever since.  It has become a valuable sales management tool and my last checklist had 25 rep-specific items!

Page 1 of the new rep checklist shows standard new hire items that everyone, including sales reps need – in addition to the ones mentioned above this list includes door keys and codes, office supplies, benefit package, confidentiality agreement and an employee handbook. Piggybacking on your HR person’s checklist – or if there isn’t one, talking them into using yours – can work well, you gilded-tongued devil.

Page 2 is where the rep-specific infrastructure starts.  Inside and outside reps are usually working with laptops so they can bring their computers home or on sales calls. They need a docking station, monitor, keyboard, mouse for the office.   Laptop keyboards and built in mice can work in a pinch but are inefficient for day-to-day use.  Also, get an extra power supply for the home office / travel  (nothing quite like forgetting to bring your power supply to a presentation on the road – besides trying to get the prospects 1970s projector to work with your laptop!).  

A personal projector is another item on the checklist for the traveling rep, even if it is Plan B. They’re less than $1000 and any field call is worth more than that in opportunity costs.  You’re already going to spend 15 minutes of your hour trying to find a an open conference room  -- why waste another 10 minutes figuring out how to connect with the prospects projector (if they have one) when half the time it’s going to show your mind-blowing paradigm-shifters in pong-like resolution?

Reps also should be connected to a color printer in addition to the standard black and white printer for potential presentations and sales materials.  Sure, emailing pdfs is the norm now but hard copy slides for 1:1s with muckety-mucks is still a good way to sell.

Reps need access to a scanner (ideally integrated into a company file system) so they can quickly get hard copy only docs and counter-executed documents scanned in and emailed back to prospects and customers.  A soft and dedicated fax email box is also nice so incoming contracts aren’t showing up in the company fax inbox interleaved with personal insurance claim forms and fax spam.

Reps are often remote and so need web email, including signature blocks, ideally with logos.  They are often not plugged into the company messenger or chat application but should be and will probably need a VPN or something similar to remotely access the corporate network system.

They need to be set-up on the CRM application, including the user profile in case the profile information -- like phone number and
address -- is being used in integrated documents like quotes.

Telephone headsets should be standard and ready on day 1 at every new rep’s desk (field and inside alike) so they can comfortably and ergonomically talk on the phone and work on the computer at the same time. I've gotten a lot of push-back on using a headset over the years but cradling a phone in your neck while trying to type or write is antediluvian.

There are a slew of sales infrastructure tools that need passwords and training – CRM, Go-To-Meeting or WebEx, Hoovers or OneSource, Leadlander, Sales Genius, the company Wiki and the sales drive, for example.  My last company had Intercall numbers as a phone-conferencing back-up option for the Go-To-Meeting phone system, which went on the fritz from time to time.

Also with the CRM system, you want to make sure you are integrated with the company Outlook calendar and the Go-To-Meeting application because you will need to schedule external and internal resources for prospect calls and you will want a record of these meetings and the related call reports in your CRM system.  You may also want your Outlook calendar (and probably email) to be integrated with your rep’s Blackberry or Treo (or, if they’re extra-hip, iPhone).

This last set of items can fall in a crack – IT doesn’t always relish delving into departmental-level apps.  You can try to get all your reps on one PDA to make the support job easier but this is IT work and they should own and document the integrations and support.  (Good luck with that!)

Reps may need access to the demo system and, if there is any way the rep can use the product you sell, access to the production system.  Documentation and training on an end-to-end product demo that a sales rep can do without assistance can be a good session for a new rep’s first week.

Every rep should get a tour of the online sales playbook during their first week so they know where the sales best practices are and how to find them.

One of the key pieces of the sales playbook for a rep’s first week can be the sales deck.  This is particularly important because this presentation captures the key value your solution delivers and shows how you differentiate from the competition.  A new rep’s needed level of education can be similar to a prospect’s on their first call. 

I’ve had success culminating the first week of new rep sales training with the new rep delivering a 1st call presentation to members of the management team posing as a prospect account the new rep intends to work.  It gives the reps an extra jolt of motivation to learn the pitch during the training sessions.

If you can have all of these sales infrastructure pieces ready to go for the reps first day of work, you've set the table for a fast rep ramp.  Now the real work of increasing sales productivity begins! 

Each blog entry will focus on an example of a best practice sales tool to give you specific ideas of how to sell better.  While this new rep checklist is a best practice sales management tool, most tools discussed will be used by the reps themselves.  But a a sales scalebook for sales managers is equally as important as a sales scalebook for sales reps.

Increasing sales productivity in business-to-business environments with complex sales cycles has been a never-ending pursuit.  In his book 'Birth of a Salesman',   Walter Friedman chronicles the 200 page playbook (later scaled down to 55 pages) that John Patterson, the founder of NCR, assembled in the late 19th century in his attempt to get his salepeople to systematically present and sell his cash registers.

Patterson was unusually focused on sales tools for his salesforce and was rewarded with one of the most successful companies in business history.  But this level of focus on tools to scale sales is unusual and the problem of low sales productivity is still very much with us.  CSO Insights documents in their annual survey of 1300 sales executives that less than 60% of sales reps made their quotas in 2007.

This blog will pursue the conversation of B2B sales productivity, its role in scaling sales organizations and the critical role of sales tools in capturing sales best practices and driving sales growth.