Here are some points to consider or debate (with me or among your team):

• Beginning in 2000, I heard sales leader after sales leader say that relationship selling was dead.  Not all of them said that, thankfully, but a lot did.  It wasn’t dead then, and it isn’t dead now.  The ability to leverage relationships between sellers and buyers for the benefit of the individuals’ and, more importantly, for their companies’ benefit thrives in many selling environments.  If you don’t think it does in yours, you might be mistaken.  We know that in some sectors, as perceived and real business risk has escalated, relationships with suppliers has become more important now than it was five years ago.
  

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• Again, sales leaders who believe there is little to no relationship component in their sales approach are often wrong.  Conversely, sales leaders who believe that relationships are a significant and critical component to their sales approach often sacrifice the value from other critical factors, such as industry and business knowledge, or competitive selling.  It’s not easy to get the balance right.  In fact, we sometimes find disagreements among regional managers in the same company.  “It’s a technical sell!”  “No, it’s a relationship sell!”  “No, it’s a business sell!” (It’s most often all three.)
  

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• Relationship selling isn’t just about building and maintaining relationships.  It’s about knowing whom to build relationships with, what to base the relationships on (trust is at the top of the list, right?), and how to leverage the relationships to both parties’ advantage.  For the salesperson, this requires the right personality traits, specific hard and soft skills, and a strategic view.  Skills?  Getting your hands on the customer’s organization chart (or reverse engineering it if one is not available) is just a first step.  Figuring out where leveragable influence lies in a customer organization is another.  Discerning and validating both the personal and business wins for that influencer requires even more skill and experience.  Envisioning how to accomplish that and then communicating it to the other person comes next.  Ultimately having an influencer or decision-maker convince themselves that being  your ally is right for their company and for them?   That’s how most of the biggest deals get won.
  

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• Some sales trainers and sales training companies understand these issues.  Many do not. That could be risky for you.  Let’s say a training company doesn’t really believe that recommenders, influencers, and decision-makers can informally impact the strictest, documented vendor evaluation process.  They think, for example, that when you sell in the public sector, you just have to follow the rules and that any policies prohibiting association with vendors overrides any possibility of relationship building.  If you yourself don’t know how to overcome that challenge (companies do it all the time!) and the vendor can’t lead you in the right direction, you’re sunk.
  

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• If relationship selling is a critical competency for selling your products and services, then it must be included in the hiring profile for whoever does the selling in your organization.  We’re amazed at how companies complain that their reps can’t build leveragable relationships and continue to hire people with the same deficiencies. (Remember, if they don’t have the right traits, training can rarely help.)

What’s your position and approach with respect to relationships?  Need an overhaul?  Don’t wait.

Photo credit: Fotolia #17064658

I presented today on a webinar sponsored by Genius.com. The TAS Group hosted the event. I shared the results of ESR’s survey on the use of social media in B2B sales. Few of the 400 B2B salesreps surveyed say Twitter has directly contributed to them winning business.

An interesting question was posed by an audience member about pushback with the new social media, such as we had with faxes and email. So that prompted this post, with a few observations. Understand, I’m no Twitter guru. I don’t have a million followers, or even a thousand. I’m still figuring out how best to use it, gaining and providing value.

Some observations:

• People find me and follow me. I get an email. I click on their profile. More make strange bedfellows than not. I don’t understand why they’d want to follow me. It takes time to do that. A minute? Often, from a selfish perspective, it’s wasted time. Is this spam?
• @writingroads who is a writer who lives here on Martha’s Vineyard taught me that it’s not all about just tweeting about your business. Julie found me and got hired for an ESR project because of other interests that we shared. Her tweets cover a wide variety of subjects. She tells me that that’s how to use Twitter. Tweet about what interests you. You will find people with similar interests and others will find you. Doing business with those comes naturally, if there is business to be done. That works great for someone like Julie. It wouldn’t work for a salesrep of a large company for many reasons. At least I don’t think so.
• Tom Pick wrote a post today on How to Use Twitter For Business. He cites Whole Foods, Comcast, Starbucks and Ford as companies who leverage Twitter. I looked at their recent tweets. Good article. Thanks, Tom.
• I don’t get people who block their updates. Why do that? It defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? Maybe I don’t get it.
• I un-follow hardcore self-promoters. I did that twice yesterday. People I know pretty well. I found one sales trainer in the Middle East. Began to follow. What came next were dozens of tweets each day just promoting courses he was giving. Ugh. Bye. If I do that, someone let me know.
• I love people who provide real value. @DavidABrock is one. @LouisColumbus is another. @SteveKayser and @CharlesHGreen, too. Then there is John Caddell (@jmcaddell). There are many more. I try to use them as a model, but I have a long way to go.
• It’s nice to have someone RT (retweet) one of your tweets. Again, I do that when it’s appropriate. I need to more of that. Some of the people I follow are really smart.
• When I’m really busy with work, I don’t have the time or inclination to use Twitter. Am I not fully committed to Twitter as a medium? Or is that reasonable behavior?
• Those of you who read this blog know I’m concerned about B2B salespeople who spend too much time on Twitter rather than what has been proven to work in selling. Some salespeople will look for any shortcut or trick to avoid the ongoing learning and hard work required for sales success.

What do you think?

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• Jigsaw;
• LinkedIn;
• Twitter;
• Plaxo;
• Facebook;
• Hoover’s or OneSource.

The pace of technology development today is dizzying. It seems as though a new sales-related technology appears daily. The question is, do these new technologies produce additional sales or just consume valuable selling time and distract sales leaders and their teams from focusing on what can really improve performance?

A few specifics from the survey:

1. 35% of respondents say that LinkedIn has helped them win sometimes or often;
2. 69% of respondents say they don’t use Twitter. Of those that douse the tool, 20% say it has not helped them win;
3. 8% of respondents say that Facebook has helped them win sometimes or often.

Buy the 10-page ESR/Insight™ Brief, The New Social Media: Do They Enable B2B Selling? now.

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The four of us had an email exchange today after some comments to one of Jonathan’s posts.  The comments sounded like sweeping indictments of “old school,” and the four of us as well.

What’s really worth considering, as Dave Brock pointed out in the email thread, is that people are attacking the four of us for being old school, when we’re all entrenched in the new social media: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, virtual meetings, and much of the rest.  Are they attacking our not being immersed in the new social media, which you would think might be their mission? No.  They’re attacking us for the opinions we voice about the social media from within the social media environment.² We’re not outside observers.

Here is an edited slice of my thoughts on the subject of social media zealotry and “old school” from that thread:

ESR has studied the issue of inter-generational selling. It’s a big challenge for companies and for consultants and trainers. It will become even more challenging. How do we “experts” stay relevant to younger salespeople, managers and CEOs is one question. The bigger question is how will younger salespeople become relevant to serious corporate buyers?

Here are a few more questions: The Millennials (Y’ers) show considerably less willingness to follow convention (read process) than those who are older—a generalization, I admit. Salespeople in general have less discipline and process-orientation than professionals, which compounds the problem. B2B customer buying patterns and practices are getting tougher, requiring more discipline, process, strategy, etc. on the part of those who sell to them. So how will the Millennials, many of whom are rejecting much of what has come before, wind up selling though this capability gap? Answer: Many will not! Companies will have to tighten up their profile for B2B salespeople and a boatload of soft skills with little else won’t be a desired characteristic—not in the kind of serious B2B selling that drives the economy. So the pure social media types will have that to play with that in their spare time, or lock on to a subset of buyers in corporations who may be open to that stuff.

A client of ours went into a very tough negotiation with a well-known company yesterday.  Big, big bucks! They were meeting with a senior strategic procurement executive. Facebook? Twitter? Blogs? Virtual or online anything?  No. Weeks of research, customer profiling, political positioning, testing approaches, strategizing, number crunching, competitive positioning, collaborative brainstorming and one very, very important face-to-face meeting. Is that model going to change in the next few years? Sure, in some sales environments, but not in mission critical areas of most companies over $200 million in sales.

With all this being said, with respect to the business side of my life, I’ll listen to and consider anyone’s opinion on any subject, so long as they can express their opinion clearly and succinctly and don’t resort to manipulation, games, or personal attacks.  I believe passion is good.  So is being a zealot, if your goal is benevolent as well as your means of getting there.  I confess:  I’m a sales effectiveness zealot.

Notes:

1. Jonathan Farrington is hosting the kick-off event for the Top Sales Experts Roundtable:  The Future of Professional Selling on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 1.00 pm EDT.  I’ll be a panel member.  With Jonathan in charge, it’ll be worth your investment.
2. ESR will be publishing the findings from our recent survey on the new social media’s role in B2B selling next week.  If you’d like to be notified of the publication of this report, subscribe to this blog or the ESR/Alert^TM.

Photo credit: © Carsten Reisinger – Fotolia.com

Greg Taylor was the salesrep.  He, along with VP of sales Steve Andersen, did a fabulous job.  The deal came in at $1.9 million, which was the largest deal for Datalogix up until that time.  We took a customer-focused, proactive approach.  I was VP of Operations at the time, and I drew up a plan to commence support operations by moving several people to the U.K., and opening up an office there.    Bostik felt very comfortable with it and that was a key reason they decided to go with Datalogix.  Since I had a diversified background in sales, operations, professional services, software development, marketing, etc., the board asked my to spend the next 18 months in Europe.  (By the way, Greg and Steve completely outsold Marcam, who was our competitor.  I wound up working for them several years later.)

My new role as VP of International Operations was to drive the launch of the company in Europe.  I was to bring the VP of Europe, Jim Cluchey, up to speed.  Another of my roles was to drive the strategic relationships we had established with IBM, DEC, and HP, and to contribute to the sales effort wherever I could.  Jim was a really smart guy and a experienced software executive.  We had recruited him away from Cognos, where he ran their European operation.

Datalogix was making significant progress implementing additional Bostik sites in other countries in Europe.  During that time, Jim Cluchey and I were devising a strategy on how to expand our reach within Total.  We had the right software, but the wrong platform.  Total ran on IBM’s AS/400 platform, and our Unix-based software ran on just about everything else.  There was a possibility that we could rehost our software onto the AS/400 and we decided we would approach Total’s VP of IS  with that plan.

Jim Cluchey went to great lengths to secure a meeting with Leo Mercier, Total’s VP of IS to discuss the progress of Datalogix’s Bostik implementations to date (flawless, and Leo knew it) and our future ability to support other Total chemical companies.  Leo was receptive.  Jim and I were encouraged.

Jim and I met in Paris the morning of the meeting.  He had flown in from London, and I from Rotterdam, where I was then living, coaching the new central Europe general manager.  Total was headquartered at La Défense, in Paris.  We were scheduled to meet with Mercier from 1:00 to 2:00 in the afternoon.  As we made our way to the office we took yet another opportunity to validate our plan for the meeting.  We knew we had to overcome the IBM challenge, but we felt confident we could do that.

At one o’clock Jim and I arrived in Leo’s office.  His assistant told us Leo was at lunch and would return shortly.  Jim and I sat there until 1:55.  That’s right, 1:55.  When Leo arrived, he invited us into his office.  No apology.  No smile.  Not even a hint of one.  He uttered one sentence.  “I want a 40 percent discount.”

As GM of Europe, Jim owned that account.  He did the right thing by telling Leo that we needed to understand their situation: what plants needed our software, what hardware platforms were required, timelines, resources, etc., before we could discuss any discount.  Leo huffed and said he had another meeting.  We left the meeting angry, frustrated and determined to go under, over, around or through Leo Mercier.

What went wrong?  Was it the centuries-old Franco-American problem? Ineffective qualification?  The NIH (not-invented-here) syndrome?  Some effective blocking by IBM, who was threatened by our Unix-based solution and had Leo’s ear?  An unwillingness to acknowledge a success in a new, unproven division of Total? Leo just being a tough negotiator? His ego?  Just one of those bad meetings that happens to everyone?

Jim continued to make great progress in Europe.  We made a number of good sales—some strategic and some tactical.  I moved back to the States early having overachieved on my objectives.   Later on I left the company.  I had heard that additional systems were sold into Total, but only after Mercier’s departure from the company.  With all that I had done before that day and considerably more after, I’ll never forget that meeting.

What did Jim and I do wrong?  What would you have done differently?

Elizabeth shared with me that her firm just added 15 sales consultants and kicked off a new partnership in India.  They have a new program, Securing Strategic Appointments, in which the participants learn, among other things, how to craft the right message, with valid business reasons, to meet with customer executives.  In addition, the program lays out specific plans for getting those critical appointments.  Elizabeth says there is a lot of interest in using these skills for selling to the government.

We talked about the economy and travel restrictions.  Miller Heiman has set up additional public sessions.  I wrote a post about public sales training sessions a while back.  They are, under certain circumstances, something to consider.

Elizabeth and I discussed technology as well.  According to Elizabeth, Miller Heiman has made significant progress with their e-learning offerings and their sales enablement tools that integrate with the top nine CRM systems (through White Springs).  Miller Heiman consultants are also now performing Blue Sheet reviews via webinars and conference calls, helping to keep their customers’ costs down.

Back to Miller Heiman’s marketing.  Miller Heiman’s brand equity is substantial.  That’s not only because they’ve been around for thirty years.  (Other training companies have been around that long or nearly that long.)  So far as sales training companies are concerned, Miller Heiman is predominant on the Web.  I’ve got Miller Heiman tagged in Google Alerts, as well as 40 or so other sales training companies.  There is no question that Miller Heiman significantly outnumbers the others with hits coming from blogs, articles, other companies’ websites (Hoover, for example), conference agendas, news, and other sources.

“Strategic Selling,” a trademarked Miller Heiman brand, is certainly widely recognized, but has become so often used generically, that it may not be connected to Miller Heiman as often as they would like.  This is similar to the issue that SPI has with their trademarked “Solution Selling.”

Miller Heiman’s leadership position in marketing isn’t something to take lightly.  After all, with the close relationship sales should have with marketing in most companies, a training company’s ability to market themselves effectively is a proof statement of an understanding of some of the most important issues, isn’t it?

Finally, this all may sound terrific to you if you’re searching out a sales training company. I can only warn you that selecting Miller Heiman or any other company based upon this or any other one-page write up is precisely the wrong thing to do.  ESR’s Sales Training Vendor Guide, Third Edition, will be published later this month.  In the Guide, Miller Heiman and two dozen other providers are evaluated, compared and contrasted.

Disclosure:  Miller Heiman subscribes to ESR’s research.

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Axel, a proponent of social media for B2B sales made a strong case for massive adoption, now.

What follows is my comment to Axel’s post in Death of a sales man.  There are a number of other comments to read, most of which make some good points.

I agree with many of your points.  I see things a bit differently … with respect to where some components of some sales peoples’ jobs are headed in the short term.  Technology, and more specifically, social media are playing a larger and larger role.  No argument from me there.  I know that as a researcher, as a business person, as a salesperson, and as a buyer!  I’m engaged.

Here, however, are some points for consideration:

• Some major market segments are today very, very far away from regular and widespread use of social media between buyers and sellers.  Industries such as industrial equipment, insurance, and some sub-sectors of health care have a long way to go.  There are other segments as well.  Government sales is in that category.  Those lagging industries and local, state and federal agencies, for the time being, are employing more traditional ways of learning about products and services—Web 1.0—looking at alternative vendors’ websites and discussions with salespeople and the experts they bring to the party.  Attempt to come at them through social media and you’ll likely find no one at the other end of the tweet.
• Certain modes of selling will lag significantly in the adoption of social media as a selling tool and capability.  As one example, the success of the strategic account manager (SAM) presently depends on many of the more traditional sales skills and capabilities to drive the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue they each bring to their companies each year.  Will that change?  Sure.  But not this week, this month, or maybe even this year.  If the seller tried to alter that relationship it would be very risky. [The premier source of intelligence on that discipline is SAMA: the Strategic Account Management Association.]

We can’t throw out all the old concepts, approaches and skills just yet.  Many billions of dollars of business will get done this year by sellers employing the skills taught by Miller Heiman, Wilson, Huthwaite, Holden, SPI, The Complex Sale, and the other larger as well as single-person firms. My firm studies those companies and has audited the performance improvement results that some of their clients have achieved.

I know there are many reading this that think that stuff is old and irrelevant.  I agree.  It is, but only in a minority of B2B selling situations.  Mainstream corporate and government sales success is still driven by overall compliance with a buyer-centric sales methodology.  I know some don’t want to hear that.  But the fact is this: research proves that compliance with many traditional sales best-practices is getting the job done for many companies.

So, if my points about social media being relevant to a relatively small piece of the B2B market are correct, we are potentially doing a real disservice to many sales people and managers by distracting them with representations that the whole world of selling is changing, now.

I would estimate that 80 to 90% of direct salespeople in B2B sales need to get better at the more traditional approaches to selling–for the time being. This is important:  There is significant room for improvement in sales performance through sales leaders adopting the best-practices of top-performing selling companies in areas other than social media.

Here’s the bottom line for me, Axel:  If a salesperson’s buyers have really embraced social media as a way to establish and build relationship with those who would provide them with valuable products and services, great.  Those companies do exist.  But in general, and regretfully for some I’m sure, we’re just not there yet.

Special favor: I’m really interested in your feedback on this subject.  If you’re a sales leader, would you please take this brief Kadient survey?  It will help us figure out what is really going on with respect to the use of social media in B2B sales.

Note: I suggest the reader peruse the comments to this post.  Wow!

Rather than me tell you about him, I asked him some questions instead.  Read, learn and enjoy.

Dave Stein: You’ve created a fabulous brand around “trusted advisor.” Since I’m a believer in personal branding, would you explain a few of the most important steps you took to build your brand?

Charlie Green: Well, I didn’t consciously set out to create a brand; I’m not recommending anyone do that, just telling you how it happened. But in retrospect, I think a couple of things were helpful.

One was certainly the name itself. Trusted Advisor was a term that has had some currency for a long time. It was probably un-trademarkable at the time, and certainly is now. It had been used in advertisements, and everyone had an intuitive sense of it as relevant, but vague. In retrospect, that was a helluva good decision.

In my case, I also chose a high-content, high transparency route. Following some great advice and example from David Maister, I wrote an awful lot, made sure it was very good, and put it all out there. My economic model is based on keynotes and seminars, not on selling videos or online product. That means I have no reason not to pretty much put everything out there-it enhances my brand, which is good for visibility (and pricing).

Finally, I give a lot of credit to my IT people, StressLimitDesign. They are a few young people up in Canada who combine great visual design sense with internet and technical savvy, are deeply into emerging trends (blogging, tweeting, et al) and know how to combine them to help businesses like me. Plus they work very hard. My site design-graphics, content and all-has been consciously designed to reinforce a particular brand-in my case thoughtful, provocative, insightful, broad-based, etc.

DS: What I like about your approach is that it isn’t a bunch of tips and tricks. It’s more about who you need to become than what you need to do. Do I have that about right?

CG: Absolutely. I deeply believe that when it comes to something as complex as trust, “tips and tricks” cannot cut it. Would you trust someone whose approach to trust was based on “tips and tricks?” No. Being trustworthy at its root is relational-it’s got to involve some sense of behaving appropriately with another, whether it’s caring about them, or being concerned, or deferred gratification, or customer focus. We trust people because we believe they’re not going to treat us as objects for their gratification, means to their ends. And that is a matter of character. Not tips and tricks.

And it goes beyond that. The dominant shift in management thinking in the last four decades has been all about “tips and tricks,” that is, behavioral approaches. Think about how obsessed we have become with measurement, management processes, outsourcing, rewards and incentives. In each of these areas, we have become behaviorally obsessed-the root of “tips and tricks.” What we have left behind is all the parts of business that have to do with relationships, beliefs and attitudes, internal mindsets. And those are what are critical to trust. We don’t trust behaviors, we trust the motives behind those behaviors. If someone’s motives are suspect, their behaviors are completely useless-we suspect them all. Tips and tricks all become the bases for suspicion and lack of trust.

Whew-you got me wound up on that one!

DS: Can you give us a (brief) example of how you have used your trusted advisor status to outposition or outsell a competitor of yours?

CG: Several. But it’s a little paradoxical; the way you “outsell” someone is by not thinking of it as “outselling” a competitor, but by doing a better job of serving a customer. The competitive outcome (and the profit outcome, for that matter) is a byproduct, not a goal.

Example 1. A client asked me in to talk about a program. He told me up front who the competitors were. I said, “those are all good options. Let’s talk about what it is that you need, and that will help you determine who to go with.” We then talked for several hours, brainstorming, about what kind of program they should design. We never touched on the topic of competitors again in that conversation, only on his program.

Basically, I took the attitude that this was the first day of the project, and we appropriately started at the high level brainstorming kind of interaction. He called me the next day to say he had chosen me. I didn’t ask why, but he volunteered: “You were the only one who was clearly willing to work collaboratively with us, rather than go back to the black box and propose something.” He didn’t say more about the others, and I didn’t ask.

Example 2. A first-meeting client asked me, “Why should we go with you?” I said, “I have no idea why, or even whether you should go with me at all. We just met! It would be arrogant of me to tell you what you should do, much less why. Let’s talk, and then we can figure it out together, and if I’m not the right person for the job, I’ll be the first to tell you, because there’s nothing worse then selling a job you can’t deliver. So let’s figure out together who it is you need to be working with.” He laughed, and we got along great from then on.

Example 3. One of the things I suggest is that you write your next proposal sitting next to the prospective client, rather than back at the office. When I started to recommend that, of course I had to live by my own advice. A keynote speech client approached me after the speech and said, “We’d like to hire you for some seminar work-so I guess you’ll be wanting to come over and write the proposal with us. What will we need to bring to the meeting?”

Not much, I said, “some information about how you’ve approached seminars in the past would be useful. But mainly, we’ll talk through what you want to accomplish and think about how to do it.” The client thought for a minute and said, “Oh to heck with it, we’ll just send you a contract to sign, we don’t need to go through any formalities.” In other words, the mere offer of being so transparent was sufficient to trigger the buying decision.

I think all of those cases come from two simple ideas.

One is that the main job, the only job really, is to do good things for your client. Period. That, and every once in a while look up and say am I deploying my resources intelligently. No point in drilling an obviously dry hole. But to start worrying about whether this meeting is a good one or not, how’s my sales call efficiency, how will I close the deal, how much margin can I get-no. Don’t go there. Just stay focused on doing the right thing for the client. If you do that, the rest will become obvious. You should be selected, or you should not. You can do the job, or you cannot. They can pay you a fair price, or they cannot. If all that becomes clear, then they will buy, or they will not. Either way, you’ve advanced their business. And-you get a lot of respect, references and future business by simply staying focused on them, not on your own internal navel-gazing metrics and processes.

Second is the idea of selling by doing, not selling by telling. Beyond the bare minimum of who you are (30 seconds max, and your website probably already did the trick), people DO NOT want to hear about your qualifications. They also don’t want to hear about how wonderful you were to a bunch of strangers-it’s like telling someone on a blind date about how great all your past dates thought you were. Instead, just focus on this client. Do the work in real time. Start delivering at the first sales meeting. Assume you’ve got the job, and start working it. That actually sells, because everyone’s favorite subject is themselves. So, focus on them. And show them your wares. The best selling is samples selling; so, give some samples. Go into the sales call with a blank yellow pad and a few questions, and start listening, and interacting. Start delivering in the sales call. That IS the sales call.

DS: How do you see your trusted advisor orientation having an impact on a sales professional’s ability to weather this financial crisis?

CG: You are deeply immersed in this subject-more so than many other experts are in theirs. Anyone reading your blog can see that. What thought process to you employ to keep you focused and able to look deeper and deeper into this subject?

One thing I’ve noticed is the default tendency of everyone to go short-term, tactical, inward, self-focused, and to see this recession as just that- a recession. The trick is to notice this is not a recession-this is just the downside of a two-part cycle. All relationships are up and down, good times and bad times, sickness and health. Is your perspective the relationship cycle? Or just what you can get out the other at each point in time?

Who do you trust? The people who stick by you in the downside. This is a great opportunity to forge really strong relationships, when everyone else is scrambling for their spot in the lifeboat. If you can be the one who dances with the one who brung you, who demonstrates true service when the client really needs it, guess what? You reap the benefits later. It’s a simple as deferred gratification, but almost all our management techniques du jour-again I’m back to measurements and reward systems and “tips and tricks”–very few of those reach out beyond a few months. None of them focus on multi-year perspectives. But that’s what it takes.

I saw one firm that serves professional services client whose recommendation for the recession included “if you’re going to lay people off, do it in FY2008, so you get the tax deduction.” See what I mean about short term and selfish? By contrast, what if you’re a law firm in Cleveland? This is the time you go to the Cleveland Symphony and you say, “This is tough on us; but it’s got to be even tougher on you. Here’s $10K, and it’s unrestricted.”

Pick a few, select clients-you cannot do this for everyone, but isn’t that the point of relationships?—and say to them “we’re giving you a break on receivables cycle,” or “we’d like to give you some free staff days to work on that strategic project we discussed with you,” or “we don’t want to lay off people, but we’re under-employed-would you like us to second someone to you for 3 months,” or “we know you need this done but can’t afford it just now, we’ll split the cost with you.”

Remember, no one has repealed the law of gravity. What went up goes down, but it wil rise again. And people have long memories. They trust those who did well by them. Make sure that’s you.

Charlie Green has taught in executive education programs for several business schools. He was with the MAC Group and its successor, Gemini Consulting, for 20 years, where his roles included strategy consulting (in Europe and the United States), Vice President of Planning, and other leadership positions. He is the founder of Trusted Advisor Associates.

Photo credit: © Swifter – Fotolia.com

Voluntary rules cut out free gifts
sales reps use to influence physicians

The story lead: “The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the major lobbying group for drug companies including Merck, Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb, enacted new rules governing how sales representatives in the field can interact with physicians.”

This isn’t really news.  This new position has been developing for quite some time.  In fact, The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) banned gifts to doctors of any size, including free meals, back in 2006.  They aren’t alone.

Drug salespeople are under real scrutiny.  I suspect that will increase with the incoming Obama administration.  That’s good.

Many doctors have had issues for years with the tactics of drug reps, not to mention the sheer number of them.  A while back,  WSJ columnist Benjamin Brewer, a family practice doctor in Forrest, Ill., decided he would no longer see drug sales reps in his office.  One of his many complaints was that drug companies sent multiple reps to his office pushing the same drugs, hoping one of them would succeed.

I just spoke with a nurse practitioner who is in a private practice in a group with a number of doctors.  She has only received one gift from a drug rep: a textbook.  Drug reps had been providing educational lunches at her practice.  She believes that there are doctors who would prescribe drugs based upon what they might have received in gifts or favors or other freebies from drug reps.  She’s not happy about that.

One of my former doctors (before I moved),  knowing I was in sales, complained bitterly about the drug sales reps.  He described them as ill-prepared, pushy, often arrogant, and far too plentiful.  Understand that’s only one doctor’s opinion.  I’m not painting all pharmaceutical sales reps with one broad brush.  In fact, I see that the problem is with the system, not with them.

What is the issue here?  Two words come immediately to mind.  Distrust and bribery.  And the reps are in the middle.

Would a doctor really prescribe a drug that she “favors” because of unfair influence by a drug salesperson?  With more than 800,000 doctors in the U.S. (according to USA Today), you can be sure some of them do, even if only a handful.   Those few docs and their drug company co-conspirators will probably tell you there is a firewall between what gifts the docs receive (they’re small anyway, they’d say) and what drugs those docs prescribe for their patients.  Here’s a question:  So why do it?

I’m an HMO-card-carrying participant in the system.  I don’t want any doctor who treats me or anyone I care about being “influenced” by anything but the right thing for the patient.  Influence doctors through your knowledge, experience, insight and trust. No gifts, no freebies, no more.

Cartoon credit: Pennsylvania Gazette (Click on image).

UPDATE: I sent my own doctor a link to this blog post.  I received this email response.  For privacy, I only removed identifying text which I replaced with ellipses (…) :

I have never seen a drug rep nor taken a gift. When we started the Department of … at … in 19.., I stepped up and would not let the residents be exposed to drug reps. We took no freebies. There are good studies that show the prescribing practices of doctors and doctors-in-training are influenced when they are exposed to free meals and talks by drug reps or their representatives. The other departments at … thought we were crazy to not take the free lunches and agree to pay for lunch out of our dept budget. It was a great coup when the whole med school went drug rep/freebie free. …

I think the $ should go to lower the price of drugs for all. I think doctors should learn their medicine from our most reputable journals that are tightly peer reviewed. Drug companies wouldn’t put so much $ into it if freebies and reps did not “pay off”.

Anyhow, you can see it is a pet issue for me.

And for me as well, doc!

One of the top firms among the 26 sales performance improvement providers ESR covers is Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI).  Founder and managing partner Steve Andersen is recognized as a thought-leader in the demanding and often misunderstood area of strategic account management. (Listen to Steve in an ESR/Podcast.)

To understanding what a strategic account management methodology is you’ve got to look at that old word “strategy.” Your salespeople are simply not going to be able to drive the kind of long-term, mutually profitable relationship with a customer by the seat of their pants, employing  tactics, tips and tricks.  Strategic account management is serious business.  In the U.K. I worked with a Hewlett-Packard SAM whose team of 40 HP account managers serviced a Europe-based global consumer package goods company.  Even your best heavy-hitter sales hunter would fall flat on their face in a business situation like that.  Believe me.

Over the years, ESR has recommended that some of our clients join The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) for the programs, resources, expertise and ability for their SAMs (strategic account managers) to network with other SAMs.  Steve Andersen is one of the experts that present regularly at SAMA events.

I posed a few questions to Steve as we come into this challenging new year:

Dave Stein: What actions are some of the more strategic of your clients taking during this economic crisis with respect to managing their strategic accounts?

Steve Andersen: Everyone knows that a supplier’s most important assets are their customers, but I continue to be surprised at how little some organizations are doing to become more strategic to their most strategic customers. Despite the economic downturn, many of our clients are investing in best practices that will position them to become more strategic to key customers through the deployment of advanced selling skills and the strategic account management efforts of their sales organization. We’re seeing a renewed commitment to understanding how important customers define value, sell, create and deliver this value, and then follow-up with customized metrics and measures that have meaning and significance to both the customer and the supplier. (Note: ESR audited and certified PMI’s sales performance improvement measurement methodology.)

DS: What are they doing in-house to weather the storm?

SA: Many of our clients are re-assessing their value propositions for their most strategic customers and are now deploying programs that will connect them more directly with what these customers value most. Other are expanding the level of field coaching that they expect from their first and second-level sales managers and equipping them to be more proactive with sales coaching best practices that will help them create value for their reps and salespeople ‘out on the street,  reducing rework in the process. We have several clients with travel restrictions going into effect for 2009, and we’re building customized, blended training and reinforcement programs for them (utilizing WebEx, Sales 2.0, Web 2.0/3D and Second Life technologies) to maintain the momentum of their current training initiatives, and in some cases, to launch new, “next level” initiatives. Other clients are planning to get more out of their investments in CRM solutions, and we’re working actively with them to technologically enable their sales best practices solutions to provide more value to the end-users.

DS: Do you see any new or innovative approaches in the area of strategic account management?

SA: Yes – many! So many, in fact, they PMI is offering a new “sales best practice” solution area to our clients that we refer to as “Innovate to Differentiate.”  Through our client work, we have had the good fortune to observe the best practices of some of the top account managers in the world and have documented and organized our findings in what we call the “Zones of Innovation.” When we observe an innovative best practice, particularly those that either create customer value, provide supplier competitive advantage/differentiation, or as is usually the case, both, we add this to the appropriate “Zone.” In a smaller 2009 market, we believe that innovative best practices can be the difference between winning and losing business, and of all of the innovative best practices that we’re observing, perhaps the “hottest” is planning collaboratively with strategic customers—our clients’ customers, that it.  It’s surprising to see just how much can be gained by simply changing the way that you engage with your customer so that the supplier is more aligned with their customer’s decision process.

DS: What are PMI’s prospects for 2009.

SA: 2008 was one of the most successful years in PMI’s history, and I believe that this was because of the type of value that we are creating for our clients. Much of our work is at the strategic customer/supplier level, as opposed to basic Sales 101—type training, and these types of projects are more important than ever in a down economy. To illustrate, we kicked-off a new client project in November with the SVP of Worldwide Sales taking center stage and informing the audience (his entire sales management team) that he could either “invest in the future” or shut-down all discretionary spending. He explained that his decision was the former and he made it quite clear that he expected them to do their part and win a “bigger piece of a smaller pie” in 2009. This client is deploying several of PMI’s SAM programs. This evaluation was quite competitive, with several vendors covered by ES Research in the mix, as well as an incumbent “strategy consultant.” With clients like this, we are forecasting another strong year in 2009.

Note: ESR has found that many sales training providers do not have specific methodology, curricula and content for strategic account management programs.  Yet, they try to convince their buyers that they do.  In 2009 ESR will target coverage of challenges and solutions around strategic account management and the providers that excel in that discipline. This is the first part in a series.

Disclosure: Performance Methods, Inc. subscribes to ESR’s research.

Photo credit: © Jason Branz – Fotolia.com