Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Passion is a word that gets of a lot of attention but not nearly enough effort to make it real.

Especially in mass customization strategies.

To be passionate about serving your customers is to decide to blow up any process, procedure or program that gets in the way of delighting them to the point they are willing to tattoo your logo on their wrist. Do the products you produce for their unique needs kick ass enough to do that?  If not, then it’s time to change.

It is that over-the-top experience delivered to customers where they are willing to wait in driving snow for hours to buy your next product.  It is the recognition that their needs and passions mean so much more than making life between 9am and 5pm easy, comfortable, and predictable for your company.  True passion for customer innovation never stops; it is not on the clock.  It is incessant, never stopping, continually moving.  It is alive.  It refuses to compromise to just make life inside a company easy; it takes the hard road to make customers’ roads and lives so much easier.  It is passion for service personified.

Be Accountable for the Product Experiences You Deliver

So how does all this relate to a mass customization strategy?

Because too often when mass customization strategies are implemented, the pain inside the company comes first and the customer experiences comes last.  Hitting financial goals over time with mass customization strategies is a clear signal they are working.  Yet too many companies are hunkered down and have an analytics addiction – they need the next metric to get a fix.  When in fact the best “fix” of all is making the customer experiences delivered with product configuration so strong, so resonating with a passion that people are inclined to get your logo tattooed on their arms.

You own the customer experience you deliver. Does your mass customization strategy show a passion that never stops considering how to make your customers’ lives better?  Or their customers?  Or making channels more competitively strong in a brutal economy?  Start looking at mass customization strategies not through an analytics addiction supported by an ever-growing list of metrics, but by the plain and simple truth that you own the experiences you deliver everyday.

Take-Aways

• Audit customer satisfaction with all your product configurators now. Face it; your competitors already know the answer to this question.  They know where you excel and where you don’t, because in the latter case they are winning your customers as a result.  Get focused on the most critical analytics of all, the satisfaction you are delivering with your product configuration strategies.  This needs to include resellers and your end customers too.

• Mass customization and product configuration strategies must be an integral part of any multichannel selling and service, never standalone. Over the years of working with mass customization strategies as a user and analyst, I can tell you that the quickest path to an epic fail is to keep your product configurators isolated.  Having pricing, product catalogs and product models synchronized across all channels also says to your resellers and customers you’ve decided that this is critical enough to make them a core part of your selling and service strategies.

• How many product configuration system and strategy changes are customer driven? Ask yourself, are your product configuration strategies and their supporting systems being changed to reflect your changing customers’ needs or are they being modified to make life in your company comfortable? On this point it’s critically important to be honest.  Because over time only product configuration strategies that reflect your customers’ changing needs will matter.

• Earn the right to have your customers tattoo your logos on their arms by obsessing how your mass customization strategies can delight customers. It takes an altogether different mindset to get away from purely seeing mass customization as a means to internal efficiency and realize all those metrics pale in comparison to driving your customers’ loyalty and passion for your brand.  Making the experience exceptional, and so strong that it shows your mass customization strategies are truly world class – then you will have earned the right to have customers tattoo themselves with your logo.  A lofty goal and one that takes total, absolute intensity – but so worth it.

Bottom line: Today go get started on a customer satisfaction audit of your mass customization strategies and see what you find out.  How far are you from delivering a kick ass experience for your customers?  Be real because they are -  and so are your competitors. Your future deepens on the passion for service your customers see.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerbooktrance/64059445/in/set-1383493/

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Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Sales people live and die by the relationships they make. not their cataloging skills.

Like archeological finds, rolodexes preserve the past.  Some can tell you the entire career of technology buyers over twenty years.  Rolodexes are a fine research instrument but a selling tool inching towards irrelevance.

Kick Some Life into Your Selling Relationships

Whenever some senior sales professional proclaims “I’ve got a killer Rolodex and I can sell millions of dollars in enterprise software!”  Inside I immediately call B.S. on it.  A Rolodex belongs in a museum, relationships are what matter today.  Can a Rolodex lead to someone buying more? No.  Can a Rolodex inspire trust?  No.

How many times have you gotten a call from someone you haven’t heard from in years and all the want to sell you something?  Congratulations! You have just been excavated from a Rolodex. This is no way to sell in an era where trust is more valuable than gold.  

Investing In Relationships  Instead of Cataloging Them

So if you’re in sales and you haven’t gotten on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter to connect with your prospects and customers – it’s 2010 – what are you waiting for?  It’s time to wake up and realize everyone, even technology buyers, are changing fast. Social networks are a big part of that shift.

Authenticity, honesty, transparency and trust, they are the fuel of social networks that make enable them to work.  Sure there is a ton of deception going on out there, but imagine how powerful it is to be the one person in another’s network who is real and can really help them?  Powerful indeed.  You will never get a selling relationship to these levels sitting at your desk thumbing through a Rolodex.  You have to engage and be real.

If you are in sales there is no excuse for not having a calendar full of appointments and lunches with old contacts you’ve reconnected with through social networks. If they are not on Facebook, Twitter or the social networking platform of choice, you need to get them there.

Key Take-Aways

• If you aren’t earning trust you aren’t selling. It’s time to take that bold step and take accountability for your own selling network, your own selling brand. Ultimately it’s your reputation on the line, regardless of the strengths or weaknesses of who you work for. Social networks unleash your brand as a sales professional.  Making social networks work for your selling strategies does a lot more for your career than any amount of whining and complaining ever did.

• Pick 50 cards out of your Rolodex now and make the relationships live again. Call each of these people, your top 50 contacts, and connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, and talk to them.  Make the relationship alive again.  Real selling is about tackling problems for customers even if there isn’t necessarily an immediate sale – it’s about building trust by freeing giving insight, intelligence and help.

• Playing the Blame Game is a cop-out, work your network instead. I deeply respect the salespersons in enterprise software, computer hardware and electronic components that nailed their quota in 2009 and are kicking butt right now even though the economy is tough. They were smart enough to build their networks early on using social networking apps, worked the networks to understand how the economy was impacting their prospects and customers, and in short – have a passionate interest in what is going on with each of them.  Not just monthly for a filing their status reports.  Daily. With intensity and focus. They are 110% committed to their prospects and customers. These people are too busy working their networks to play the Blame Game.

Bottom line: Imagine if all the sales teams in your company decided to make the most important relationships cataloged in their Rolodex come alive again. That infusion of intensity and customer focus can change a company – and no sales team ever accomplished that going card after card in a Rolodex dialing for dollars.

Flickr image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54658420@N00/182395939/

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For many manufacturers, their indirect channels are the majority of their revenue; yet they sell only a small percentage of their most profitable products, opting instead to move literally tons of low-margin, competitively priced products, eventually competing on price and availability.The electronic-components industry is a case in point. With little opportunity to customize services or products, pricing and availability are all that matter.

Yet the trend from many manufacturers to measure their channel partners’ margin contribution is forcing distributors, value-added resellers and channel partners of all types of up-sell services to look for new ways to sell higher-margin products. For manufacturers aiming to gain greater in-channel share, selling strategies that simplify the complex sale are critical.

The following are the top nine lessons that Cincom’s Manufacturing Business Systems has learned from working with manufacturers to make themselves easier to do business with when it comes to selling higher margin, complex products:

1. Making quoting consistent across all sales channels is a must-have.
For one globally known helicopter manufacturer, their quoting system is an island within marketing. Not integrated with pricing, manufacturing or service, this quoting system delivers elegantly prepared, 100-plus-page quotes, yet the entire quote must be re-engineered by manufacturing and pricing. The rework time on validating quotes has cost this company business. If you have multiple quoting systems for each sales channel, consider consolidating them down to a single quoting system and integrating with pricing and manufacturing. It’s significant work upfront to do this and can take six months to a year, but it’s worth it as a long-term competitive advantage.

2. Quoting history needs to be captured and used.
Manufacturers in the heavy-equipment and truck industries write quotes on napkins and then transcribe them into Word, sometimes rewriting the last quote with the current one in a Word template. Consider at least looking at how your company can create a historical view of quotes by customer. This history is invaluable to win/loss analysis and future selling.

3. Don’t get played in pricing.
One electronics distributor found that there was a different pricing database for online quoting versus telemarketing’s quoting tools, versus the direct sales force. The distributor’s customers realizing they could use the web to get pricing and availability, then call their telemarketing rep to get a lower price. Many manufacturers and distributors alike don’t realize that their customers are playing them across channels for better prices due to each quoting system having a different pricing database or version of pricing tables.

4. Pushing order status, pricing inquiries and guided selling to channel partners first.
These three areas comprise over 70% of the inquiries for one global PC manufacturer. Push order status out as the first application on a channel partner portal, even if it means delaying order management or any other applications. It will pay for itself in time savings for telemarketing reps. Pricing inquiries along with availability is a must-have, and if your company is like the PC manufacturer, accessories are a significant revenue source (over 15% of revenue annually). Consider getting a guided-selling application out on your website, then link it to quoting for up-sell and cross-sell reminders for sales reps.

5. Replace blind price cuts with an automated special pricing request strategy.
One manufacturer of communications equipment has a staff of seven who handles pricing exceptions from their indirect channels, working with rules and constraints as defined by senior management for approving price drops on larger deals. Senior management must personally approve the largest deals. Moving from manually managing this process to automating it wins business and for one disk-drive manufacturer, netted out significant revenue increases at the end of every quarter based on the savings on reaction time alone.

6. Configuring to-order products through channels delivers margins.
Instead of just relying on channel partners to sell your least-complex and most likely lowest-margin products, start considering a strategy of enabling them to sell higher-margin, more-complex, configurable products as well. It’s possible to do this by adding a product configurator to your channel strategies mix. Product configurators take the many attributes, subassemblies and characteristics of a product, including its constraints, and interlinks them into an easily maintained model that channel partners, resellers and the direct sales forces can use to define products that precisely align with the needs of customers. Manufacturers getting the best results with product configurators are integrating them with pricing, services and most importantly, ERP systems so bills of materials can be automatically generated and routed through production. Defining and selling complex products through channels is paying off for manufacturers, with one consumer products manufacturer, Nike, launching a build-to-order show through NikeID.com as an extreme example of using product configuration to sell through their online direct sales channel.

7. Use your product catalog as the basis of cross-selling and up-selling.
The essence of any successful cross-selling and up-selling strategy is making the right recommendations for the right products at the right time. When combined with both online catalogs and product configurators, catalogs are making a difference in closed sales for many manufacturers and distributors alike.

8. Guided selling isn’t just for your soon-to-be-discontinued products.
In previous research completed on guided selling, manufacturers’ reliance on this strategy for only selling slow-moving or end-of-life products has proven to be shortsighted. Manufacturers today are making guided selling part of their launch plans. In the case of consumer-products companies, this strategy is capturing the majority of their gross margins. Selling products only on the internet prior to releasing them to retailers and mass merchandisers, is resulting in greater lifetime product-line profitability.

9. Get passionate about improving based on good and bad feedback.
Finally, never be afraid to ask how your company can improve, especially when it comes to selling through channels. For Gateway, one of their best ideas on the launch of a new Microsoft operating system on their high-performance desktops came from a channel-partner summit.

The Bottom Line
Every channel partner’s business model, information and product needs are different. Unifying their collective needs to sell more profitably is what best practices in quoting and configuration are all about.

Image: Money! by Tracy O

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Streamlining the quote-to-order process improves competitive advantage

One of the first sales tricks you learn during your first fast-food job is the process of “upselling.” Say a customer comes to the counter and orders a soda. If they don’t specify the size, you ask them if they would like a large soda. You never suggest a small soda.

The idea is that if the customer really wanted a medium and you offered a small soda, they might take the small soda. On the other hand, if you offered a large soda and they really had a small in mind, a medium now doesn’t seem so “large.” They’ll take the medium, earning your employer a few cents. Those cents — multiplied across hundreds of franchises add up to thousands of dollars a year.

In the fast-food business, supply isn’t a problem. Sodas of all varieties are in abundant supply. It’s how much soda you can sell that sets you apart from your competition.

Complex manufacturers by nature move products that are exponentially more difficult to configure than a large diet soda. But the order process for their products should be almost as simple and transparent to a regular customer. It is a cost-savings and relationship-building process that savvy companies are just beginning to explore.

The burden of excessive supply

Ever since Henry Ford first put cars on a conveyor belt, the keyword for complex manufacturers has been efficiency. In the past, American companies were rewarded for getting more products out the door faster to a world eager to consume their goods. As the global economy emerges as a reality — and not just a buzzword — these same companies now find their manufacturing processes highly efficient, but some of their sales processes woefully out of touch.

These sales processes need to be streamlined to reflect a new business model where it’s just as important to move products as to manufacture them. In order to remain competitive, companies must capture more market share by building relationships and being easier to work with than their competitors.

The quote-to-order process is a perfect example of an area that has not had much scrutiny from efficiency experts. In reality, it can be a serious drain not only to productivity and profitability, but it can also harm a customer’s positive perception of your company.

Getting it right the first time

Like kids playing a game of telephone, the quote-to-order process is not always a smooth path. With too many operators in the middle of the action, there is a great potential for miscommunication and error.

Consider the typical quote-to-order process. A sales rep takes the call from a customer and listens as the customer describes what they want.
Even a seasoned sales rep that has complex knowledge of the product and how it is manufactured can easily overlook a customer request that contains incompatible parts or customizations that are no longer available. The result? Customers end up with quotes that are invalid or functionally not optimal.

This situation worsens when invalid quotes are manually turned into orders with invalid configurations, incomplete information, unsatisfied product outcomes, and unforeseen price discrepancies. These can all lead to lower profit margins or even losses on the sale.

With a more controlled quote-to-order process, these problems can be turned into a major competitive advantage that will capture more market share. Instead of letting the customer drive the order conversation, new technologies present sales reps with a list of questions to ask about each order. Each question, when answered by a customer, leads to another set of questions, based upon the specifications established by the manufacturing floor, procurement and engineering.

Since the system is tied to procurement and the manufacturing floor, the sales rep can instantly give the customer a much more accurate projection of when their order can be delivered. If parts or materials are missing, procurement can be instantly (and seamlessly) alerted to the needs of this order as it is being processed.

This new emphasis puts a new spin on the customer-facing process that relies on knowledge management and rules management. What does all that mean? It means that the correct information is gathered — and quoted to the customer — the first time, every time. In a sense, the configuration is the DNA of the order. If you get it right, the results are predictable.

Efficiencies further down the line

The cost-savings of a more advanced quote-to-order system don’t end in the sales office. When implemented correctly, the return on investment can extend across the enterprise.

Many companies employ engineers who are responsible for double-checking sales quotes and orders. These engineers validate the specs in the order, search for information missing from the order and then develop schematics for that specific order.

With an advanced quote-to-order system filling the need, these engineers can use their skills more effectively for new product development. The system validates each quote based upon the rules specified and begins to create schematics for the order based upon existing knowledge. This allows the shop floor to schedule appropriate staff for incoming orders much more accurately.

Changes to orders are an inevitable part of doing business. Most changes, however, should come from customers, not from an inefficient quote-to-order process.

At multiple levels, changes are expensive, requiring time and resources to process the changes through the product lifecycle. The cost of change skyrockets as the order gets closer to delivery when manufacturers are forced to scrap nearly finished products due to misalignment with customers’ needs. This complicates build schedules, engineering, and manufacturing. The total cost of change is seldom recovered with special prices. Most companies never fully recover the costs of change and see their profit margins erode.

Planning for future demand

Focusing on the customer-facing processes within an organization may be the most important initiative a company can leverage.

Imagine how much more accurate forecasts would be if:

• Quotes could be generated in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks
• ALL quotes were stored in a centralized database and available for reporting as soon as they are created
• Orders were electronically generated directly from the quotes in the quote database
• Win/loss rates were known and predictable based on the history in the quote database
• Future sales could be predicted with a high degree of accuracy several months in advance (at the time of quote instead of the time of order)

If all of this were possible, imagine the benefits to the company:

• The ability to predict labor requirements — increase or decrease labor pool based on forecasted sales
• The ability to predict inventory requirements, and stock what is most likely to sell
• The ability to negotiate purchases more effectively through more buying leverage
• The ability to offer price incentives to improve business before the end of the quarter
• The ability to provide more accurate guidance to shareholders

Focusing on customer-facing systems may be the most effective way to address the sales challenges of complex manufacturers.

This article was originally written by Jim Hessin, a former employee of Cincom Systems.

Images: Due Bills Only by lungstruck and Business Graph by nDevilTV

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Educating Resellers, like Selling, Must Never Stop

When manufacturers are grappling with how to get more of their products sold at a lower cost, they will often turn to channel management programs – and for good reason.  Relying on several different channels is a necessity to reduce costs of sales cycles, penetrate vertical markets, gain critical insight into how to better manage pricing and contracts, and stay in front of prospects – many of which are deciding which channels they will prefer to purchase from in the future.

Multichannel management is the 21rst century equivalent of the no-brainer strategy, the “must do” if any company wants to stay relevant, grow and be challenged on how to sell more effectively and with greater insight into customer needs.  Add in the mercurial change that social networking brings to channel management and the entire set of assumptions of how channels operate changes radically.

Growing Trusted Advisors during Turbulent Times

In watching manufacturers execute their channel management strategies one can see those that clearly get it – they are passionate about getting their customers to their goals – making an impact and seeing lasting change for their customers’ clients too.  This intensity is what makes their channel management strategies resonate and come alive with the excitement of learning.

Best of all, companies doing this are showing their resellers why the critical connection of how much you knowledge you have about products, solutions, systems and processes that can be applied to customers’ problems is directly related to how much you can earn.

Knowledge sells, generates trust, guides resellers on how best serve – and it must never stop as a passion for any company with a channel partner program.  Trust is the new currency, and to the extent your company can earn, keep, grow, be worthy of, and continually honor and respect the trust of resellers is the extent to which more sales can be made.  In this mindset transactions are not the endgame, but the chance to always be of service and be an integral part to a customers’ business is.

Beyond Kumbaya to Results

With so much riding on getting resellers up to speed on products, combined with the accelerating rate of information being sent through social networks, companies need to embrace a systematic approach to sharing, updating and verifying information resellers have is accurate.  The credibility of each reseller is at stake depending on how the information is used.  Here are lessons learned on how to get beyond Kumbaya to results:

• Always be educating – through all channels possible on a 24/7 basis. The use of weekly webinars in Cisco to keep their resellers, an online library and the development of roles-based use of their quoting and product configuration systems has made Cisco one of the more effective channel educators in the market.

• Your channels are a classroom, not just a source of revenue. The highest performing companies have this mindset that educating their channel partners – and for that matter foreign subsidiaries – is more about continually looking to strengthen their channels with intelligence and less about just pushing pricing or availability data to them.

• Measure your own and channel partners’ performance. You can create a balanced scorecard that quickly shows if you are being successful in keeping your channels knowledgeable or not.  From the simple measures of request for assistance to the growth of certifications, it’s critically important to measure performance not just from a selling, but also from a learning standpoint as well.

• Realize that the technologies your products or services are based on may be incredibly difficult to understand for your channels. This is the case with one statistical software company which is a perennial challenger to SAS and SPSS.  The company has created online tutorials of their products specifically for resellers so they can practice demos on laptops with no Internet connection.  These Java-based demo tools have increased demo performance by over 67%!

• Be the most aggressive company in your industry when it comes to sponsoring thought leader events with the world’s leading colleges and universities. The alliance of AMR Research with Stanford University is a case in point, where the two organizations have created unique, highly valuable supply chain events that are thought provoking and also participated in by many of the world’s most well run organizations.  Go in this direction and gain trusted advisor status not only with your channels, but with your customers as well.

Bottom line: Trust is the new currency and to earn it a company has to recommit to enrich, grow, strengthen and passionately serve its channels with intelligence, insight and knowledge.  Only by finding that resonating passion to make your channels grow stronger with knowing how best to use your company’s products, services, programs and expertise to overwhelming solve customers’ problems can new sales be earned.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerdurden/411048096/

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The essence of excellent selling is helping customers past the dangerous pitfalls their strategies may hold and guiding them to their goals. Product configuration platforms in high-tech, industrial plant and equipment, telecom and many other industries are the lighthouses that combined with selling expertise keep companies on the path to their goals.

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Agendas grow out of motive and intent. So, when motives and intentions are not open and transparent to all involved, “hidden agendas” inevitably develop. These hidden agendas are often buried or disguised within the subtext or context of many situations. This tendency to camouflage motives is especially prevalent in too many complex sales cycles.

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Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Joe Pine’s many books and speeches on how mass customization is more about creating exceptional customer experiences rather than just delivering services or products certainly is resonating in the commercial insurance arena.  Joe Pine has shown how product and services configuration as a contributing factor in mass customization strategies is also more about delivering experiences over just a bid, quote or policy in commercial insurance industry for example.

Complex Selling as an Experience

Of all the companies in the commercial insurance market, Geico continually illustrates how complex selling can be turned into an exceptional and memorable experience.  In addition, Geico continues to be one of the highest-rated commercial and personal insurers in the U.S. on customer satisfaction surveys completed by Forrester Research.  This is because the company concentrates on making each of the channels customers purchase through as usable, easily understood and helpful as possible. The Geico website has won awards for its ease of use as its bidding, estimating and quoting process has as well.

Geico has transformed commercial insurance in the process.  The lessons learned from how Geico has been able to make complex selling simplified are evident in the following lessons learned:

• Don’t be afraid to be creative and nonconformist in messaging. The Geico Gecko is now even more well known than comparable brand mascots in the insurance industry as are the cavemen.  One of their latest commercials is shown below.

• Focus on usability and streamlining the bidding, estimating and quoting process. For both commercial and personal insurance, the company has been successful with this aspect of their strategy.  They have in fact won awards for their website usability.

• Making the customer part of the experience is critical. Joe Pine discusses this in his books and also in the TED Talk you can view here.  Get the customer involved in the experience to assure customer loyalty over time.

Bottom line: Complex selling of commercial insurance needs to focus on creating an exceptional and memorable experience for customers to gain their loyalty and trust over time.  Geico gets it; they also accomplish all this and entertain too.

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/21992612@N03/3486400930/

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Good demand/lead generation is a continuous process that involves targeted messages and campaign management, response management, lead qualification, sales inclusion and customer relationship-building and retention.

Revenues have been the primary measure of sales performance and still are. For marketing departments, the number of leads generated has often been used as the key metric. This can result in an emphasis on simply increasing the sheer number of leads from a marketing effort. This may also result in frustration for sales teams because of the perception that marketing-generated leads may not be fully qualified.

A number of business analysts visualize the process of lead generation and how that results in sales, like a funnel with holes along its sides that represent “leaks.” Lead and demand generation activities by marketing departments fall into the funnel at the top. Because of the increased use of a wide variety of interest-generating media, such as telemarketing, the internet, and social media channels, leads are often more challenging to qualify. Often the number of leads generated is larger and the leads are in various states of qualification.

However, along the length of the funnel, leads leak out for several reasons, such as:

• Poor qualification methods
• The time leads are in the funnel, which can cause a “warm” lead to go “cold”
• Limited follow-up by sales

The result is that between 40% and 80% of the original leads may be lost before they arrive at the end of the funnel, where they may appear as sales opportunities.

How to prevent the loss of sales leads

To prevent the loss of leads, it may be useful to ask the following:

• What is meant by a “qualified” lead, and do both sales and marketing agree on the definition? Sales often expresses skepticism about the quality and “warmth” of the leads generated by marketing campaigns. Concurrently, marketing is often skeptical about sales reps’ ability to translate all the leads generated into actual sales. Technological systems like the one we use—Eloqua help to standardize and automate some parts of the process and should improve agreement and the ability of these two groups to collaborate.
• How are marketing campaigns evaluated so they can be continued or changed to make them more successful? The number of leads alone is not usually a good metric, as mentioned above, and now technology is available that can track campaign performance based on qualified leads and other metrics.
• Is there a process in place for providing the prospect’s interests to sales reps before they make the follow-up call? One way of looking at ongoing communications to collect such information is called “drip-marketing.” It involves the use of a variety of media to connect with the prospect in a personal, regular and consistent way. It requires technologies and processes, strategies to ensure privacy and compliance, and ongoing testing and measurement to determine effectiveness.

Addressing these sorts of questions basically results in the insertion of another layer in the process of marketing’s discovery of prospects and handing them off to sales. A means of qualifying the leads now occurs before the hand-off, providing sales with both names and intelligence about them and a much “warmer” prospect than before.

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Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Recently Cincom Founder and CEO Tom Nies published an article titled Rhythm and Tempo Must Be Orchestrated by the Maestro. He draws the parallels to Maestros controlling the rhythm, metre and tempo of a symphonic performance to that of a selling professional who seeks to excel at value-based selling in complex selling cycles. He points out that for sales cycles to be successful, each person and department contributing to their success needs to be synchronized with each other.  Knowing when to jump at an opportunity with total intensity and passion versus when to pull back and use time wisely is a key point of the article in addition to many more.

His many points made me stop and think of the best examples of leaders controlling the rhythm, metre and pace of their teams to their goals.  Coach John Wooden of UCLA immediately came to mind.  With a career record of 664-162 (.804), 10 NCAA National Championships, 13 trips to the Final Four and a member of the inaugural class of inductees for the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006, Coach Wooden exemplifies what being a Maestro is all about. No other collegiate coach has won this many national championships in the history of NCAA basketball. Consider the players he orchestrated through their collegiate careers, including Bill Walton, Gail Goodrich, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Grevey and many others.

Complex Selling Cycles and Basketball Seasons: Both Need Values to Succeed

Sales professionals who sell on value are a lot like Coach Wooden.

They orchestrate their teams to align with the most urgent needs of prospects, capitalize on opportunities to excel and compete more often against themselves than letting a sales cycle degenerate into a price war.  When entire companies choose to sell on value, just as when entire basketball programs do, they improve over a season.  The same dynamic happens in complex selling cycles. Being more focused on using time competitively is what also differentiates winning sales cycles and winning basketball teams.

Respect and value for time must anchor any long-term selling effort, the same way a coach will look to the hours invested in practice to make their team the strongest, fastest, and smartest it can be. Being a Maestro or coach also requires that a new perception of time be communicated to everyone involved in a sales cycle or team, and it is this: competitive strength comes from how time is used and invested, not in the size or financial might of a competitor.  Coach Wooden could attest to this.

Managing Time Is the Greatest Competitive Strength

UCLA’s first national championship under Coach Wooden came 1964 against Duke, a basketball powerhouse and a financially stronger school than UCLA at the time.  Coach Wooden came into that national championship with a perfect 30-0 record.  How? From exceptional recruiting?  UCLA was relatively unknown for basketball to this point. Exceptional alumni donations?  The UCLA basketball budget in 1964 was less than many pay for a new car in 2010.

It was valuing time and making the most of it, time used well was the great equalizer, the competitive strength UCLA used to win their first national championship and nine more.

Just as any sales professional knows who has managed and won complex selling cycles, the competitor who manages their time the most effectively has a greater chance of winning. Everyone competing in a complex sales cycles has to wake up every day and resolve to be more efficient, more focused, stronger with solutions for the prospect than their competitor – and when this mindset is achieved complex selling cycles are won.

Seeing Time as a Competitive Asset First, Constraint Second

A great coach can control the rhythm, metre and pace of a game their team is competing in.  The same holds true for sales professionals who sell on value when they are managing complex selling cycles.  A common trait both have – and it is essential to control rhythm, metre and pace – is seeing time not in fear but as a competitive strength to be gained by using it well.  Coach Wooden at times quoted verses to his players including Ecclesiastes 9:11, The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. In other words, everyone has the same amount of time; it’s up to each of us – selling or supporting the selling cycle – how we’re going to use it.

Wooden’s Competitive Secret: Strong Values Lead to Championships

Just as a Maestro conducts a symphony comprised of widely varying instruments, so too a sales professional orchestrates selling teams that each have their unique strengths used in the service of customers.  What unifies an orchestra or symphony and the highest performing sales teams are their shared values.

Coach John Wooden began work on the Wooden Pyramid of Success, shown below and downloadable in PDF format here, over his years of coaching first at Indiana State and through the years at UCLA. Take a moment and read over the Pyramid of Success and reflect on the highest performing sales teams you’ve ever worked with.  If your experiences are like mine, you can readily attest to a very large overlap.  The best salespeople who sell on value are teachers; they genuinely love to serve their customers.  Indeed some see it as a calling to be of service to customers and have a passion for it. Best of all, the Wooden Pyramid of Success succinctly communicates what great teams exemplify and that is a selflessness of service and a willingness to give complete intensity and focus to winning.

Bottom line: Complex selling cycles are as long or longer than a basketball season.  Anchoring the coordinated efforts of teams in shared values and treating time not with fear but with an opportunistic mindset makes all the difference.  From the Maestro who delivers an excellent performance to Coach Wooden winning 10 NCAA National Championships, to the sales professionals who sell on value and orchestrate their teams to winning new business, all must be anchored in solid, strong values to succeed.

Coach Wooden image from UCLA: http://www.english.ucla.edu/ucla1960s/7274/chen4.htm

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