Deal Coaching is a Lost Art (Part 3 in a series)

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Peter

What really holds us back

Please note: Peter’s new eBook, Coaching is a Lost Art is now available via PDF http://www.complexsale.com/ebook-lost-art.html and can also be found via Kindle and other reader platforms

It seems so simple – deal coaching doesn’t take a lot of time (when done well) and has an obvious return on time invested.  Why isn’t it a core competency of the average sales organization?  There are several reasons (which doesn’t mean they’re excusable):

Sales reps and managers are too busy.  When I ask sales managers why they don’t coach opportunities more consistently they often talk about the “tyranny of the urgent” in their average day or week.  It may represent the comfort of ‘busyness’: “At least I feel valuable and needed if I am always busy, even if my time is not allocated to the most important activities that can help us close more business.”  Translated: They may be too busy to win!

They have a “forecast-flogging” mentality (i.e. the forecast discussion goes something like this, “When’s the deal going to close? For how much? What help do you need?”).  These are not strategy questions, they’re questions that allow the sales manager to provide a semi-educated guess about the validity of their forecast submission this month.

Perhaps worse yet, when these managers actually conduct a strategy session they do so with little or no structure.  They may also employ what I call “ambush” coaching – asking a surprise set of questions each time I coach opportunities with the sales teams.

Often the sales reps in an organization have a built in resistance to deal coaching either because they perceive minimal value or, worse yet, it actually hurts their productivity because it takes valuable time away from their clients and they perceive little value in the exercise when it’s not done well.

They don’t have the tools to coach effectively.  Said another way, they lack the straightforward ability to efficiently review the status of a deal, i.e., whether they’re winning or losing, whose vote they need to win, and their strategy to close the deal.  If deal coaching isn’t simple and repeatable, it typically doesn’t happen.

Sales managers don’t proactively build this coaching discipline into their schedule.  Instead, they “hope” they can find time in their calendar “gaps” to conduct deal strategy sessions and the time is rarely found.

Or, perhaps your sales managers have never been taught how to coach deals effectively.  You promoted them from a career as a successful sales rep and assume that since they were a great “player” they are likely to be a great “coach.”   It doesn’t happen that way in sports, why do we think it will work any better in sales?

I’ve also found that even when deal coaching is done regularly, it doesn’t mean that the coaching will be effective and there are a variety of reasons:

Group forecast conferences – what a joy!  We’ve all been there: a 90 minute forecast call that involves 10 sales people which means that each of the sales reps presents for approximately 9 minutes to update the manager on 10 deals in their pipeline.  How much value do these bring to your team?  More importantly, how useful was it to the other 9 reps who had to listen for 81 minutes with no relevance to their territory or deals?!

Coaching deals at the wrong time.  As you might guess, most coaching I witness is done towards the end of the deal pursuit, mostly because it is the time when the deal is forecasted at a high probability and the business is counting on the revenue.  It begs the question: when is the best time to coach deals?  You guessed it: early – when you have time to adjust or to help discern whether the deal is worth pursuing in the first place (qualifying). 

Deal strategy sessions that have no structure, with no consistency about the coaching questions that are used in each session and, perhaps most painfully, a session where we wander aimlessly into issues and topics that aren’t even applicable to the deal we’re working.  We’ve all experienced this in our selling careers!

Premature prescription – the sales manager hears a few updates on the background of the deal and 3 minutes into the session the manager jumps to the uniformed answers – mostly unencumbered by the facts!  Sound familiar?  It happens every day in most sales organizations!

Stealing the deal – this is the “superman” sales managers who hears about trouble in an opportunity that is critical to make this month’s forecast and instead of coaching and equipping the sales person to win the deal they jump in with both feet and take over the pursuit because that’s what they feel best equipped and most comfortable doing.  This strategy can work in the short term but it doesn’t help their people or their results in the long term!

Or, perhaps worst of all, sales managers in a deal coaching session are more focused on fixing the blame instead of fixing the problem or addressing the challenge.  Being overly judgmental is not the answer and trying to find and place the guilt is usually counter-productive.

I’ll be interested in your experience and observations as well!

Posted in Business Development, Deal Coaching, Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales Strategy, UnSelling | Leave a comment

Root Causes of Losing Deals You Can’t Afford to Lose (2nd in a series)

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Peter

Losing is not a one dimensional challenge. The problem is almost never just a coaching problem. You can’t just focus on developing tools and tactics to defeat your most formidable competitor and then “hope” your win rate rises dramatically.  You also can’t just rely on conducting a sales training class and expect results to rise and be sustained. Instead, let’s look at the most common causes of losing new business to see why coaching can be instrumental in the context of these challenges:

  • Sales and Sales Management Talent – You could have the best products and a great sales methodology but if you don’t have the right people in your organization you will lose more often than you’d prefer.  Which kind of talent is most important? I’d suggest sales management without hesitation.  The reason is that great sales managers will hire great sales people, will develop B players into A’s and will move C players out of the business as quickly as practical.  Great sales managers will also ensure that we are coaching the key opportunities and developing the strategies and tactics to win these critical deals.  Do you have the right sales management talent in your organization?
  • Sales and marketing strategy – there are several components in this category that can contribute to sales excellence (or mediocrity):
    • Segmentation – do you have clarity on the ideal target markets and clients that represent the best fit for your solution?  If not, you could have a great weapon, but aimed at the wrong target can result in shooting something near and dear to you (like your foot).
    • Solutions – do you have the right solution that the market needs and do your solutions have a competitive price/value equation?  If not, the greatest sales, management, and coaching in your industry will not overcome this liability.
    • Sales and marketing tools – do you have the collateral, case studies, tools, and roadmap that you provide your sales teams to make them as efficient and effective as possible?  If not, your sales reps will “wing it” to see what works individually and you won’t leverage the best practices that your best people employ to make themselves successful.
  • Arguably the biggest root cause of losing too often: you lack effective disciplines and tools for deal strategy and coaching.  When coaching is done well – a lot of the problems outlined above are mitigated because:
    • You’ll get out of deals you don’t belong chasing – particularly early in the buying and selling process
    • You’ll see, first-hand, the strengths and weaknesses of the sales people and managers on your team that you don’t see otherwise witness
    • You’ll get a lot smarter about how to understand and defeat your key competitors and leverage and apply the knowledge you gain in this process to the myriad of other deals in which you compete against these same predictable, formidable competitors.
    • And most importantly, you’ll end up winning more than your fair share of new business!

What about your team – are you winning more than your fair share of new business?  I always look forward to your feedback!

Posted in Business Development, Consultative selling, Deal Coaching, Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales Strategy | Leave a comment

Deal Coaching is a Lost Art – First in a Series

Posted on December 29, 2012 by Peter

I’ve had the opportunity to witness good and bad deal coaching from a few perspectives.  I sometimes see how well it’s done when I’m invited by my clients to coach their deal teams that are pursuing opportunities they can’t afford to lose.  It’s where I’ve spent the largest amount of my time in the last few years.  I see it when I lead sales training workshops where we use (and coach) live, “in-flight” opportunities as part of the learning experience.  And finally, I see the fruits of the coaching (or lack thereof) from the client’s perspective when I conduct the face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders as part of a win/loss review to derive lessons learned. 

Based on these three dimensions and some well-respected research on the topic, I can say with conviction that effective deal coaching is a lost art:

  • CSO Insights researches sales effectiveness-related issues in the U.S. every year and for 2011 they concluded that only 46% of “forecasted” opportunities are won. Think about how profound that is! It means that over half of the deals that your sales reps say are “forecastable” (which means they believe they will win these deals) are lost! What does that tell us about the quality of our deals and the quality of our strategies to win them?  When we’re surprised this often we are either allowing the client to mislead us, haven’t qualified the deals effectively, or we lack the strategies to close the business we ought to be winning.
  • Perhaps even more staggering: of the 54% of the deals that are lost, over 40% of those are lost to “no decision.”  If we’re not coaching sales people effectively it usually translates to poor qualification and that means we’re chasing deals we don’t belong pursuing.  It may be the biggest sin that a sales organization can commit and it’s caused by several factors:
    • Prematurely selling (or affectionately known as “dashing to the demo”) – we don’t take the time to ask the hard questions early about whether we can actually win the business and instead we embrace a philosophy that we’ve never met an opportunity we didn’t like.
    • Sometimes we’re savvy enough to resist the temptation to sell but we jump instead to the discovery phase of the selling process – which takes significant time and resources which may not be warranted.
    • Or, we make the mistaken assumption that in order to make our numbers this quarter we must have plenty of opportunities in the pipeline to achieve our goals.  We therefore become less discerning about which deals to chase and the downfall of this approach  - you aren’t going to win the deals you don’t belong pursuing.  In fact, when you embrace this strategy you dilute the time and effort of the entire organization from the deals you can’t afford to lose.

The conclusion I draw is that while many VP’s of Sales know they’re not winning their fair share of new business, they’re often frustrated because they can’t put their finger on the root cause(s).  Effective deal coaching and strategies might be the biggest antidote to the challenge.

We’ll review what “effective” looks like in coming posts.  In the meantime – let me know your thoughts!

Posted in Business Development, Consultative selling, Deal Coaching, Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales Strategy, UnSelling, keynote speakers | Leave a comment

The Root Causes of Losing Deals You Can’t Afford to Lose

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Peter

Sales organizations, large and small, spend millions of dollars annually on sales process, sales methodologies and sales training and more often than not end up disappointed with their ability to improve their overall sales results.  They’ll often assume that the primary problem is that they chose the wrong sales effectiveness firm to work with and they’ll choose another firm – only to find that the same problems continue to exist.  In reality, unless they can find the root cause of the sales deficiency, they’ll continue to chase their tail, and spend far too much money doing so.

 Losing key opportunities is not a one dimensional challenge.  Based on my experience in working with many different sales organizations and coaching hundreds of pursuit teams over the past 20 years, I’ve concluded that there is a short list of the most common causes for losses:

  • Sales and Sales Management Talent – If you don’t have the right people in the organization – you’ll lose too often.  You could have the best products and a great sales methodology and you’ll still lose far more often than you can afford.  If you ask me to choose which kind of talent is more important to sales results, I’d argue it’s sales management without hesitation.  The reason: great sales managers will hire great sales people, will develop B players into A’s and will move C players out of the business as quickly as practical.
  • Sales and Marketing Strategy – There are several components in this category that can contribute to excellence (or mediocrity):
    • Segmentation – do you have clarity on the ideal target markets and clients that represent the best fit for your solution?  If not, you could have a great weapon but when aimed at the wrong target will often result in shooting something near and dear to you (like your foot!)
    • Solutions – do you have the right solution?  Is it a solution that the market needs and has a reasonably competitive price/value equation?  If not, the greatest sales and/or sales management team you can find will not overcome this liability.
    • Sales and marketing tools – do you have the collateral, case studies, tools, and roadmap that you provide your sales teams to make them as efficient and as effective as possible?  Without these tools, your sales reps will “wing it” to see what works and you won’t leverage the lessons learned that your best sales people employ to win.
  • Or, consider the biggest root cause of losing deals you can’t afford to lose: you lack effective deal strategy and coaching disciplines.  When deal coaching is done well, a lot of the problems outlined above can be mitigated because:
    • We get out of deals we don’t belong chasing – particularly early in the buying and selling process
    • You’ll see, first-hand, the strengths and weaknesses of the sales people and managers on your team that you don’t otherwise witness
    • You’ll get a lot smarter about how to understand your competitor’s tactics and then be in a position to defeat your key competitors and leverage this knowledge to the myriad of other deals in which you compete against these same, highly predictable competitors.
    • And most importantly, deal strategy sessions allow us to win more than our fair share of new business!

 What about you?  Do you know why you’re losing deals you can’t afford to lose?  Are you comfortable with the approach your sales teams are taking to strategize on your most important opportunities? 

Stay tuned for future installments on this critical (and common) weakness!

I always welcome your comments.

Posted in Business Development, Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales Strategy, Sales Techniques, Sales Training, UnSelling | Leave a comment