Our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance. Along the way, they amassed a huge dataset from their Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys about over 1,000 managers – and talked to over 100 different companies about the current environment and the skills they’re focused on for first-line managers and up.
They found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently – certainly differently than most do today.
The top line from the research?
First, 2010 is all about growth. That’s not news, as we all know it’s not OK not to grow this year. But changing customer behavior has made growth a real challenge. For the sales function, managers are the vital linchpin for driving a return to growth in 2010.
And while coaching is absolutely crucial to sales manager success, it turns out that when it comes to growth, there is a whole other category of manager activity even more important than coaching.
What is that category of manager activity that most drives growth? The SEC calls it ‘sales innovation.’
Now, ‘innovation’ is a loaded term that can mean many things to many people, but here it refers to managers collaborating with reps to understand as deeply as possible what’s holding up a deal—why and where a deal is running into trouble at the customer, and then finding innovative ways to move it forward.
Importantly, innovation in this context is not about creating a new value proposition, or inventing a new set of capabilities or product features.
This is about creatively connecting the supplier’s existing capabilities to each customer’s unique environment, and presenting those capabilities through the specific lens of whatever customer obstacle is keeping that deal from closing.
Sales Innovation is what makes the best managers great, and the SEC has lots of support for encouraging it in your sales organization. For more, start with one of SEC’s blog posts on the topic.
So what does this mean for marketing?
1. Marketing can (and should) take the innovation happening at the deal level and help formalize it so others can benefit. If reps are finding new, resonant ways of selling your solutions, marketing can help identify whether there are other segments of customers where those ideas would work.
2. Often the innovative ideas managers and reps have at the deal level can help surface unmet customer needs or even bigger opportunities for innovation in products and services. Marketing can be the hub for collecting and evaluating these ideas.
3. Most of all, the importance of sales innovation implies a greater focus on sharing of ideas across the commercial organization – after all, creativity is best when lots of different minds have a chance to help out.
You can design systems to help encourage sharing.
MLC members, check out how NBC Universal designed its CRM system to build connections between sales and marketing and created mini facebook-like communities to talk about what’s working by segment.
What do you think? Does your sales organization encourage or discourage manager innovation?
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