Sales as I see It or The Challenger Sale (Part 05) - The Final

THE MANAGER AND THE CHALLENGER SELLING MODEL

SO FAR WE’VE focused on the rep skills and organizational capabilities required to implement the Challenger Selling Model. But anybody who’s ever attempted to execute large-scale change within a sales organization will know there’s one glaring omission to this story: the frontline sales manager.

The frontline sales manager in any sales organization is the fundamental link between strategy and execution—this is where change initiatives and sales force transformations live or die. Implementing the Challenger Selling Model is no different. You cannot expect to successfully build a Challenger sales organization if your frontline sales management layer is broken.

PORTRAIT OF A WORLD-CLASS SALES MANAGER

To interpret the table, let’s start by separating management fundamentals, like reliability, integrity, and listening skills, from the more sales-specific drivers of manager performance. As it turns out, management fundamentals account for roughly one-fourth of sales manager success.

These are the foundational skills that are necessary for success in any management job, irrespective of function. Yet interestingly, we also found that performance on these attributes does not fall along a spectrum but tends to be binary. Either you’re reliable or you’re not. You have integrity or you don’t. And that in turn tells us that these are inherent traits you should be looking for in the people you hire, not skills you want to be developing in your staff over time.

Put another way, great reps don’t necessarily make great managers. You can’t just excel at sales to be a great sales manager; you’ve also got to excel at management as well. Yet that is exactly how most companies still source new frontline management talent.

The Sales Side of Sales Manager Excellence

When we ran the analysis, we found that the attributes contributing to manager excellence fall into three high-level categories—and they’re about what you might expect: selling, coaching, and owning. This last category is all about the various aspects of business ownership that senior leaders like to see in managers—the extent to which they run their territory as if it were their own business.

Figure 8.2 represents the statistically significant factors that define the sales side of sales manager excellence.

The first thing we can say about this side of the manager job is that selling still matters. To be sure, these results aren’t saying that your best managers spend 25 percent of their time selling, but they do indicate that if we were to explain what makes your best managers so much better than everyone else, roughly 25 percent of the reason would be because of their great selling skills.

As all sales leaders know, selling skills are necessary at times since managers are often asked to cover vacant sales territories, to help close the largest sales, or just to fill in for a rep who may be on leave. But more to the point, managers are also expected to be able to model great selling behaviors for their teams.

The second driver, coaching, which accounts for 28 percent of frontline sales manager effectiveness. The size of this impact tells you what you probably expect: Coaching absolutely matters when it comes to sales management. It is a key element of manager effectiveness and, as we have long advocated to our members, a huge driver of rep performance as well.

At 29 percent, sales innovation is the single biggest sales-related attribute contributing to world-class sales manager performance—more important than selling skills and much more important than a manager’s ability to allocate resources.

Sales innovation is the missing link in terms of fully realizing the benefits of the Challenger Selling Model. Even armed with the best teaching pitches and honed capabilities for tailoring and taking control— even with strong sales managers who coach to these behaviors and can model the Challenger selling behaviors themselves—many deals will still not happen. While the Challenger model increases the likelihood that deals will move through the funnel, beating the status quo is a hard task.

COACHING TO THE KNOWN

To understand why coaching is often mismanaged by sales organizations, we need to start with a definition of coaching.

This is the definition of coaching that we’ve established with the help of a working team of members: “An ongoing and dynamic series of job embedded interactions between a sales manager and direct report, designed to diagnose, correct, and reinforce behaviors specific to that individual.” This definition lays out the foundation of coaching, and also how it differs from training.

The Business Case for Sales Coaching

Coaching matters. Formalized coaching represents a huge performance improvement opportunity in a complex sales environment. It can make the difference between hitting or missing goal for the bulk of your sales force. Our strong recommendation to our members looking to improve sales performance is to do away with coaching democratically—that is to say, coaching everyone equally—and instead shift the majority of their coaching focus away from low and star performers and toward the core.

Give Sales Managers Something to Coach To

When it comes to delivering quality coaching, the key lesson we’ve learned from several years of researching this topic is that managers can’t coach effectively unless they have something to coach to.

In figure 8.4, you see a genericized version of what this company built for their sales managers. Each sales process stage has a different set of objectives. These are the behaviors critical to that stage that the company wants to reinforce. The tool also offers a number of sample questions a manager might ask to engage his reps in a coaching conversation around the objectives of that particular stage.

Help Managers to “PAUSE” for Effective Coaching

Hypothesis-Based Coaching leverages a powerful framework called “PAUSE,” and it’s something we encourage all of our members to use with their managers. Here’s what PAUSE stands for:

• Preparation for the Coaching Conversation: Managers need to do proper and thorough preparation in advance of any coaching session. This provides continuity between coaching events. And by thinking through which stage of the sales process the rep is in, managers can tell what behaviors are going to be critical, which is the first step to solving the observation problem of situational variation.
• Affirm the Relationship: If the rep isn’t ready to hear the coaching and buy into the manager’s role as coach, the coaching effort will be wasted. Managers need to be taught how to emphasize development by separating performance management from coaching interactions—there is always a gray line, but it is possible to create “safe” situations for coaching to occur.
• Understand Expected (Observed) Behavior: The challenge for many managers is understanding what they are seeing and what to look for when observing their reps. If managers understand what should be happening in a meeting, it’s much easier to know if it is happening.
• Specify Behavior Change: If managers know what defines critical behaviors and have an objective standard for judging those behaviors, it’s very easy for them to provide specific objective feedback. This prevents coaching from being generic, subjective, ill focused, or overwhelming.
• Embed New Behaviors: The purpose here is to move a coaching program away from being all about the coaching moment and instead make it an institutionalized process. Companies should provide tools that allow managers to create action plans for each of their reps, give continuity to managers’ coaching conversations, and give second-line sales managers a quantitative and qualitative view into their managers’ coaching activities and abilities.

INNOVATING AROUND THE UNKNOWN

Worlds in Conflict

This is critically important for an organization pursuing the Challenger model. Even with Challengers armed with effective teaching pitches and the right skills to tailor and take control of the sale, overcoming the customer’s status quo is not going to happen 100 percent of the time. Many deals will still go off the rails and get bogged down. Here’s where an innovative manager can make all the difference between closing a deal and chalking up another loss to “no decision.”

Yet as figure 8.6 shows, when you look at the impact of an efficiency focus on manager performance compared with an effectiveness focus, you find that an effectiveness focus has nearly twice the impact of an efficiency approach.

Sales success today is much less about getting better at what you already know and much more about creating an ability to tackle what you don’t know. In order to thrive in that world, you’re going to have to build a sales organization—and a sales culture—that enables that kind of innovation activity. A world where effectiveness is elevated above.

Helping Managers to Understand Their Biases

As it turns out, the kind of thinking managers rely on every day to do many other aspects of their job well is one of the biggest obstacles to their being innovative.

Narrowing thinking is all about looking at a complex problem, weighing existing options, and producing a single solution. It’s incredibly valuable in a world where managers must make tough, rapid decisions on things like allocating scarce resources. Unfortunately, at the same time, narrowing thinking also severely limits managers’ ability to develop creative solutions to hard-to-solve customer challenges, as it’s focused on eliminating options from consideration rather than generating new ones for consideration.

The alternative is “opening thinking,” which is characterized by the generation and vetting of as many alternative options as possible. While narrowing thinking may be better for resource management, opening thinking is better for deal innovation. If you’re going to build innovative managers, you’ll have to overcome managers’ natural inclination—and day-to-day pressure—to think narrowly and equip them with tools and frameworks to think openly, at least at those times when sales innovation is called for.?

Decades of research into human behavior has uncovered a number of human biases that commonly hinder opening thinking.

The six most common are:

1. Practicality bias: Ideas that seem unrealistic should be discarded.
2. Confirmation bias: Unexplainable customer behaviors can be ignored.
3. Exportability bias: If it didn’t work here, it won’t work anywhere.
4. Legacy bias: The way we’ve always done it must be best.
5. First conclusion bias: The first explanation offered is usually the best or only choice.
6. Personal bias: If I wouldn’t buy it, the customer won’t either.

These biases are not inherently “bad.” In fact, these are mental tools we all use every day to help us rapidly sort through large amounts of information and make decisions more quickly.

At the same time, however, each of these biases effectively cuts off certain paths of inquiry.

There are two simple means of helping managers overcome these biases and open up their thinking.

• The first is simply to make managers aware of these biases in the first place.
• Second, we can train managers to ask themselves (and their reps) specific questions to prompt thinking from alternate perspectives.

Holding Biases at Bay

Good prompting questions encourage us to do one of three things when considering a problem or situation: deepen our understanding, broaden our perspective, or expand our ideas.

We’ve pulled together an entire library of prompting question tools for our members, but this is one of our favorites and one that a number of our members have put to good use in their own sales organizations. It’s called the “SCAMMPERR Framework”

Start Now?

The Challenger Selling Model is a commercial transformation. Getting it right requires significant changes to the way sales and marketing interact, to the kind of tools you arm your reps with, the sort of reps you recruit, the kind of training you deliver to them, and the way managers interact with them. Getting this right—all of it—is hard.?

The Challenger Selling Model is a new operating system for the commercial organization, not just another “bolt-on” application to the existing system.