Wide Angle

My previous summaries of the Sales Executive Council’s rep success work (The Five Profiles of Sales Reps and Unpacking the Winning Sales Rep) explained how the most successful sales rep profile (the Challenger) wins by doing three things well:  Teaching, Tailoring and Asserting Control.

But who should be on the hook for encouraging successful behaviors when it comes to these activities?  Should it be left up to the individual rep?  …the sales manager?  …a central training group?  …how about Marketing?

Common sense not only tells us that it is a critical combination of all of the above, but dictates that Marketing needs to play a critical role in just about all of the competencies for them to be successful.  Here’s our take: Read More »

Following up on The Five Profiles of Sales Reps, I promised to discuss the ramifications of these findings for B2B marketers.  But first, let me offer some clarity around that work as there seems to be a fair amount of interest from across the membership…

The work previously summarized is specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?

Our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist. Read More »

For those of us in the B2B marketing world, understanding what drives sales rep effectiveness can help define the role we play in supporting our sales team.  In a recent quantitative effort by the Sales Executive Council (SEC), rep characteristics—having to do with Attitudes, Skills/Behaviors, Activities and Knowledge—were studied.  They found that certain attributes tended to clump together into a few profiles.  More specifically, five distinct groups of sales reps were found, each containing a very different combination of attributes.  See if you can guess the clear winner and the clear loser as I summarize them here: Read More »