The way I see it, there are three levels of competitive information a rep needs to know.  The first is about their competitor’s company—their size, locations, financial situation, reputation, etc. That’s all available on their website. The second level is about the competition’s products and services. Strengths are found on their website as well. The weaknesses are harder to come by, but with a network of customers, business partners, and other salesreps, as well as the willingness do a bit of ongoing research on the Internet, one can stay up with the challenges their competitors are having with their offerings.

For me, the real value is in understanding that third level—how the competitor’s sales people sell. Over the years, I’ve found that only a small percentage of salesreps think about this, even though the impact of the competitor’s selling capabilities directly and significantly impact those reps’ income, careers, and self-worth.

Can you imagine a professional athlete going into a game/match/bout/race without having completely studied, under the direction of coaches and consultants with video footage, every move, nuance, strength and weakness of the opponent? What about a politician running for office?  Hard to imagine, right?

I know that typically Marketing, Sales Enablement, and other corporate functions that are chartered to support the sales effort don’t provide much leadership or intelligence regarding this third, and most important, level of competitive information.  Sales people have to have their consciousness raised about the value of this intelligence and gleaning this information must become part of what they do every day.

Take a look at this list.  Ideally, we’d like to know this information about the salesrep who is competing against us in our most important opportunity:

1. Into what industries do they sell? Deep knowledge of the industry you are selling into can be a competitive advantage.
   

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2. Who are their largest, happiest and most unhappy customers? Reps often overuse their largest and happiest customers as references. They’ll hide their unhappy ones.
   

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3. What is their typical sales process? When do they do what? Suggest a demo? A conference room pilot? A survey/needs analysis? When do they submit a proposal? When do they go for the close?
   

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4. How high in accounts do they typically call? Some reps go right for the top with a strong, financially-driven value proposition. Others are afraid or incapable of calling high in customer organizations.
   

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5. What value do they provide during the selling cycle? Are they a knowledgeable, trusted resource for the customer?
   

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6. How are they measured and compensated? In many cases, a salesrep on 50% fixed and 50% variable compensation is more aggressive than one on a more substantial base and a bonus.  If you’ve competed against someone on 100% commission, you’ll know what I mean.
   

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7. What is their win/loss ratio against your salesrep? Although I’ve never measured it, there is momentum that’s generated when a rep wins one or two against another rep. They gain confidence. The loser has an uphill battle which grows for each deal they lose.
   

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8. What types of sales strategies do they typically use? Do they attack head on? Or are they more strategic, working on changing the customer buying criteria to what they uniquely deliver?
   

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9. When they win, why? When they lose, why? Do they have the skills, traits, behaviors, knowledge, resources and whatever else it takes to win business in your environment?
   

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10. What is their view toward your company?  What do they say about you? Do they negative sell? Where must you set traps or immunize against their assertions?
    

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11. What do they do when things are going well/badly? Do they get complacent? Glib? Do they panic, bring in management, and drop their price?
    

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The questions for sales leaders are these:

1. Do you think this information is valuable for your salesreps to have? (If not, we need to have a conversation.)
2. If so, how will you facilitate learning how to gather such information on an ongoing basis?
3. When your reps have this information, what will they have to learn to do to outsell the competition in each and every opportunity?
4. Which sales training providers do you believe provide content and learning in this area?

Cartoon: ©2004 — Dave Stein — All Rights Reserved

I’ve facilitated seven days of programmes with just one left to go.  We’ve discussed sales effectiveness-building processes and strategies for building a sales infrastructure within your companies, and you’ve done a great job in the discussions and workshops.  So, here are some tactics to consider building into your sales plans.  Consider them a bonus for a job well done.

As we discussed in the Programme, every sales process must have methods and tools  for 1) assessing the customer situation, 2) determining a sales objective, 3) devising one or more strategies, and 4) building the tactical plan that will support strategy execution.

A well-conceived strategy should be the foundation of every sales campaign.  In its simplest form, the strategy is the completion of this sentence: “The customer will buy from me because _______.”   But all of us know that once the competitive battle is on, it is the tactics we devise and execute that often make the difference between winning and losing.

Here are some of the tactics I collected over the years that have enabled sales reps at all levels in all industries to outsell the competition. But remember, these tactics need to be embedded into your overall sales plan.

1. Speak with a key buyer in an account where you have won business. Ask him specifically what, if anything, your competition did to try to upset your victory after you were selected. Chances are the competitor will try that again in another opportunity.
2. Don’t negative sell.  Ask well-planned questions that will enable your prospect to figure those weaknesses out themselves.
3. Always have at least three qualification questions ready to ask your prospect. Ask the same ones again and again to assure yourself that nothing has changed, such as the budget for your solution being reallocated to some other project.
4. Differentiate yourself through your questions. What is the best question you could ask the real buyer the first time you meet that would make them sit up and take notice?  Hint:  “What keeps you up at night?” isn’t the answer.
5. Determine where, by how much, and when your solution will impact your customer’s financial position. If you can’t do it yourself, get some help.
6. Every week learn something you didn’t know before about the industry into which you are selling. Figure out how to use that information to your advantage.
7. Introduce a sales prospect to an existing customer of yours before they ask for a reference.
8. Practice simple math tricks that will enable you to figure numbers quickly. It’s a valuable skill.
9. After getting their permission, send your prospects high-value emails containing articles, press releases, etc.  These should be personalized (not blind copied on a distribution list), with a brief, relevant comment as an introduction.
10. If you work for a large company and are competing against a smaller one, get things done immediately so you appear nimble to your prospect.
11. If you work for a small company, learn precisely how to use that to your advantage.  You can be certain your bigger competitors will attempt to portray your company’s size as a weakness. If you are competitively savvy you can discredit their strengths without negative selling.
12. Answer questions truthfully, especially when the answer is “no.”  Executives will test your integrity by asking a question to which they know (or suspect) the answer. You must pass the first time.
13. Don’t start selling until you understand what your customer thinks they need to buy. Only then can you effectively influence their vision of a solution.
14. If your prospect asks for something from you, make sure you get something in return, such as information or access to a decision maker. Admittedly that’s harder these days than ever before.
15. Closing should never be a surprise nor contentious. Make sure your prospect knows what to expect when you schedule that meeting. Solicit any objections in advance.
16. Test your final proposal with your coach in the account first, before submitting it to the real buyer.
17. If you have to depend on a lower-level person for presenting your proposal to the real buyer, make sure you have trained them to sell it upstairs.  That includes handling objections, competitive positioning, and cost justification.
18. If you don’t want to get trapped, don’t do what your competition thinks you are going to do.
19. Consider showing your executive-level coach in the account your sales plan. Under the right circumstances, it will impress them and differentiate you.
20. If you are doing a web-based presentation or demo, email the slides to your prospect 5 minutes before the meeting is scheduled, just in case the technology fails.
21. If you are going to be meeting or presenting to a prospect, call as many of the attendees in advance as possible.  Introduce yourself and find out what their expectations and issues are. When you then meet them face-to-face, the ice will already be melted.
22. Don’t invite executives and lower-level people to the same meeting or presentation.  It is nearly impossible to meet the needs of both constituencies.  Most times you’ll alienate one of the two groups.  Schedule two meetings instead.
23. List three reasons you might lose the deal. Make sure none of those happen.
24. Protect yourself against no-shows. Make sure you know who will be attending a meeting. If there’s someone in particular you want to attend, negotiate it well in advance. If that person is not available, offer to reschedule. Important: Get your prospect’s word that if a key person who has agreed to be there does not show up, you will meet with that person later. Your negotiating position is stronger before the meeting takes place.
25. Ask people in your prospect’s company how they bought the last product or service that is comparable to yours.  That will often yield insights into their buying and decision process.
26. Convert your prospect’s organization chart into a political map to see who else may be involved in the decision.
27. Is your competitor effective at selling? Find out whether the salesperson on the other side made quota last year. If not, why? If so, why?
28. Begin searching early for someone in the account who you can coach and train to help you win.
29. Perform a formal debriefing with everyone who participates in a customer meeting.  Collect observations, action items, objections.
30. When someone else on your team is presenting, face the audience if you can.  That way you can observe their reactions to what is being said.
31. Invest in a book on body language.  It will help you understand what your customer is not saying.
32. Require a formal account briefing with everyone who will participate in a customer meeting, even your CEO. Coach everyone on their role.  Prepare your team with objections and issues that might be raised during the meeting and the customized value statement/proposition to be delivered to each person, if appropriate.
33. Ask your customer what will happen if they don’t buy when they say they will. If they don’t have a good answer, the deal may not close when you think.
34. Learn how your customer competes in their market. Is it on price? Innovation? Service? Technology? Reliability?  What’s important to your customer’s customers is probably important to your customer.

If you feel that none of these is appropriate due t0 the fact that you sell through reverse auctions, RFPs, or third-party consultants all of which prevent you from having any control or even direct contact with the customer, stay tuned for a future post…

(c) 2011 – Dave Stein – All Rights Reserved.

The experts were:

• Brian Dietmeyer, CEO and Co-Founder, Think! Inc.  Brian answered questions about the power of procurement and how companies can begin to regain some of the ground lost as strategic sourcing has surged over the past decade. Previously, Brian and I discussed strategic negotiation on this podcast.
  

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• Braham Shnider, CEO and Founder, Channel Enablers.  Braham is an expert in the area of building and managing sales channels.  Braham said during the call that 70% of  products are sold not through direct sales approaches, but through channels.  I had some questions for Braham in this interview.
  

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• LaVon Koerner, President and Founder, Revenue Storm.  LaVon is an expert in demand creation, among other areas.  His explanation of how salespeople must create, rather than capture, demand was very compelling. A while back, LaVon and I had a great chat on this podcast.
  

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• Rick Page, CEO and Founder, The Complex Sale, Inc.  I asked Rick to join this advanced selling round table because of his thought-leadership in the area of political selling. His comments resonated among the whole panel.  I interviewed Rick a while back on this podcast.
  

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• Steve Andersen, Founder and Managing Partner, Performance Methods, Inc. Steve’s company, PMI, is a leader in the area of strategic account management.  Steve shared a few startling trends going on within his clients’ organizations around this critical sales-related function. Steve and I got to discuss PMI and his view of strategic account management on this podcast.
  

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Among the subjects our experts discussed were talent management challenges, future advanced selling trends, collaboration with clients and customers, and how important business acumen is in a complex selling environment.

So here’s the good news

If you missed the round table, here is the MP3 recording, courtesy of Focus.com.  Great working with those folks.

Photo credit: Fotolia.com

Clients who are using Miller Heiman’s content have been saying they want to take their application of the Strategic Selling process to the next level.  The new tool provides content above and beyond what is typically offered in Miller Heiman’s programs.  Miller Heiman also payed special attention to how salespeople learn, and the fact that they typically access information when they have a challenge—for example, having a deal stuck in the funnel.

Miller Heiman decided on a push strategy, e-mailing modules in the learning series on a monthly basis.  Salespeople can also access the content on demand.  It’s presented visually, audibly, and in document format.

In addition to the content directed at sales reps, sales managers are provided coaching tools to assure that reps are availing themselves of the content and making the most use of it.  Miller Heiman suggests one-on-one or team meetings with reps.

The modules can be customized.  For example, a video or audio of a top sales rep discussing the topic of the month could be integrated into the Miller Heiman version making it more relevant to the audience.

Each module in the series consists of a video, an animated presentation, a “back of the napkin” exercise, and a white paper.  Most of the modules are five to eight minutes long.

Miller Heiman beta-tested Advanced Concepts with 7 clients, with 300 users in total.

Miller Heiman did the right thing in investing in this Advanced Concepts technology-enabled learning platform.  It provides many of the How-to’s delivered by Miller Heiman subject matter experts, whereas their programs often don’t get past the basic components—the What’s—of their approach.  That’s not a weakness.  It’s just the way curricula are developed for companies with limited time and budgets.

Competitively, this is an important step for Miller Heiman.  A fair number of sales training providers have strong virtual learning/reinforcement offerings.   Here are just a few: Richardson, The TAS Group, RevenueStorm, Mercuri International, Imparta, and The Brooks Group.  Some providers’ virtual offerings duplicate only what is provided in their ILT (Instructor-Led Training) programs.  Miller Heiman’s approach, taking the student further and deeper into the approach, strategy or concept, can be of real value, depending on how the customer implements the tool.

Here’s the bottom line:  What will really determine whether Advanced Concepts becomes a successful product for Miller Heiman is salesrep adoption.  If reps see that investing time their time learning from the modules will put money in their pockets, they’ll use it.  If they view it as yet another demand from management that takes time away from selling, they won’t.  Miller Heiman clients should strongly consider using the recommended implementation approach.

Disclosure: Miller Heiman is an ESR subscriber.

• ESR/Brief: Miller Heiman’s Sales Access Manager ($29.95)
• ESR/Report on Miller Heiman ($99.95), which is extracted from…
• ESR’s Sales Training Vendor Guide ($495.00).

Photo credit: Fotolia.com

I flew my plane up to Norwood, MA airport a while back to meet Braham face-to-face over lunch.  Fifteen-hour differences in time zones can make scheduling phone calls a challenge.  Plus any chance to fly my plane…  We had an excellent discussion.  As a result, I thought an interview with Braham would make for interesting reading.  He and I see things very similarly when it comes to managing an indirect sales channel in a B2B environment.

Here’s the interview:

Dave Stein: Even though indirect sales accounts for nearly 70 – 80% of all products sold, why is it that it does NOT get the same attention as direct selling?

Braham Shnider: The percentage may be even higher than 80% with the advent of the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) and the push to lower selling costs. We know many of our clients have increased their adoption of indirect channels in the last 18 months. However, many sales and senior executives have been promoted from a direct sales background and I think the simple cliché applies “people do what they know best, not what they don’t know” – so they promote and develop a direct sales culture and believe that indirect channels is easier to manage and therefore often plays second fiddle to high-touch direct customer selling.

Dave: What do you see as the trend going forward, will direct sales continue to get a disproportionate share of attention and why?

Braham: There is no question in my mind that direct sales gets far more attention than it should. In fact we estimate that 80% of sales training budgets are spent on direct sales training yet up to 80% of the revenue is coming from indirect sales channels. This inverse relationship makes no sense and is just bad business. There a few thought leaders who have recognized this and are doing something about it. They are investing in securing (internally and externally) quality channel sales people, developing specific channel management competencies and ensuring that senior channel managers who manage large and strategic channel partners are compensated and recognized at the same level as a successful direct sales person.

Dave: What is the major difference between the role of someone who sells direct and someone who manages indirect sales channels?

Braham: Someone who successfully sells directly often does so because of their ability to “control” events, manage risk and provide differentiation as opportunities progress down a sales pipeline. It is their ability to wrap their hands around a qualified opportunity and not lose control that makes them successful.

Channel managers need to understand how their company’s sales methodology works and are often involved in their channel partner’s sales opportunities. They need to be able to qualify and forecast opportunities in their channel partner’s sales pipeline. But they do NOT control their channel partners or their sales opportunities as their channel partners will do things for their own reasons not because they have been told to do so by a channel manager who works for another company.

Successful Channel Management is about influencing channel partners on how they develop, manage and optimize sales opportunities while also influencing and leading change initiatives and investments that drive indirect channel revenue.

Dave: So are you saying that managing indirect sales is more difficult that selling direct?

Braham: Yes!!  Because successful channel managers need to do be able to bridge both worlds—not only do they need to know what a direct sales person does that makes them successful in building and managing sales pipeline but they also need to be able to apply that knowledge to virtually manage a sales team and deliver on a sales forecast with a team of people that does not work for them.

Dave: So what distinguishes a very successful indirect channel manager?

Braham: We have identified five specific channel management competencies that differentiate the best channel managers. These are:

1. The ability to execute on a channel partner lifecycle management strategy to identify, recruit, enable, manage, and transition channel partners in their territory;
2. Understand the business model and investment criteria of channel partners and be able to have a business conversation about investment initiatives;
3. Articulate the key issues and business priorities that affect partners’ stakeholders and have the influencing skills to manage partners to change and invest as required;
4. Manage the channel partner relationship, engagement, and achievement of joint objectives through the partner planning process;
5. Lead and manage partners to identify and resolve their own barriers to success and to become independently able to generate indirect sales revenue.

Dave: What can companies do to get a competitive advantage through the way they manage their channel teams?

Braham: Hire, fire, grade, compensate, and develop to win!  What I mean here is that there are a few thought leaders who are investing in their channel teams by deploying a channel partner lifecycle management process, recruiting better quality channel sales people, developing specific channel management competencies and ensuring that a senior channel manager who manages a large and strategic channel partner is compensated and recognized at the same level as successful direst sales person—they are peers.

Dave: Channel Enablers mainly works in high tech.  Do you think the same principles apply to other industries and their indirect sales channels?

Braham: It is our experience that the fundamentals of good channel management are the same across all industries, the only exception being industry specific nuances, business practices and naming conventions.

Dave: What are you going to be discussing in your upcoming webinars?

Braham: We have just completed our global and regional Channel Management Benchmark Study for Channel Sales Success. We will be discussing what have we learned as an industry, what skills and practices set the benchmark for channel sales success, and how well do vendors drive their adoption? In which high priority areas is current execution performance low and how should channel managers be measured, graded, compensated and developed.  The first webinar will be held June 21.  (Here is a link to the registration and information page.)

Photo credit: © Stephen Coburn – Fotolia.com

On the sell-side, the precise approach to demos will differ company-by-company, product-by-product. Selling  iPhones?  Demo early and demo often.  Selling a relatively undifferentiated piece of application software?  A early, generic demo will further commoditize you in the eyes of your prospect.  You’re just asking to be in a bake-off and ultimately a price battle, because you are drawing their attention to common features, not how you can uniquely improve their business.

On the buy-side, the lower down in an organization you’re selling, the more important the demo is.  One of the best salespeople I’ve ever worked with always sells high in his customers’ organizations.  He still says, “The best demo is no demo.”  He’s closed many multi-million dollar deals without his SE (sales engineer) having given a demo.  “With our software, there is absolutely no upside giving a demo.  But the risk is substantial, so I avoid them unless not doing one will cost me a deal.”  He doesn’t sell sexy iPhone apps.

Sam Reese, CEO of Miller Heiman, wrote a post a few weeks ago on the subject.  It’s a short post, but covers a couple of critical points.  It’s worth the read.

Another consideration:  When you’re selling software into companies with an IT organization, sometimes they’re your toughest competitor—not the other software company.  Giving IT an early demo without having already established your credibility with the business managers who need your solution provides IT with an opportunity to learn about all the reasons you shouldn’t be considered.  They could easily block any further progress by providing evidence to those business managers why your software just won’t get the job done, be compatible with the current architecture, etc., etc.  Hold off on the demo, and you can have the time to immunize the business managers against the inevitable IT nay-saying.

There are a lot of things to think about when formulating your company’s demo strategy.  For a technology company, this is a critical component of building an effective sales process.   Doing a demo as an unplanned reaction to a customer request (or demand) is never the right approach.  Neither is letting your salespeople lead with a demo because they don’t know how to carry on a discussion with the right people about the customer’s business.

Photo: © James Steidl – Fotolia.com

In any case, as ¾ progressed to 1.0 I did manage to read a great book on my Kindle: What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, my first recommendation in this post.

That Malcolm Gladwell is one smart guy.  Having read his other books, Outliers, Tipping Point, and Blink, I was a bit skeptical because this was a collection of essays that Gladwell did for New Yorker magazine.  I figured, quite cynically, that his publishers were packaging up some old stuff to make some money for the Christmas season.  That may have been their plan, but I wound up with having learned a whole lot.  Gladwell employs an interesting structure for these individual pieces.  He juxtaposes two perspectives—what you might initially believe are unrelated perspectives—to bring across his point. It is very effective.

Stories featuring Ron Popeil (the infomercial pitchman), Cesar Millan (the dog whisperer) and some other interesting people you wouldn’t know, were engaging.  His takes on Enron, McKinsey (their mentors and advisors), the Challenger disaster, criminal profiling, plagiarism, and the homeless situation captured my complete attention.

There was a big, big bonus for me in this book as well.  In one of the essays, The Talent Myth, Gladwell discusses how subjectivity impacts the interviewing of job candidates, he made as strong a case as I’ve heard for structured interviewing—the kind of interviewing I’ve been writing and talking about for years.  Here’s just an excerpt.  I love it!

This interviewing technique is known as structured interviewing, and in studies by industrial psychologists it has been shown to be the only kind of interviewing that has any success at all in predicting performance in the workplace. In the structured interviews, the format is fairly rigid. Each applicant is treated in precisely the same manner. The questions are scripted. The interviewers are carefully trained, and each applicant is rated on a series of predetermined scales. What is interesting about the structured interview is how narrow its objectives are.

Read this book.  It’s fun and you’ll learn a lot.

More than a year ago, my friend and colleague, Steve Bistritz sent me a draft of a book he and a colleague were writing.  He asked for some feedback and for an endorsement for the book for when it would be published.  It’s been out a few months now, but I do want to recommend to you Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top.  Steve, who has been recognized as an expert in the discipline of executive-level selling for decades, partnered with Nicholas Read in the writing of this book.  They make a strong team.

Whoa… Decades?  Do I really want to buy a book co-authored by a guy who has been doing this for decades, you might ask.  Yes, you do.  Steve and Nicholas have experience, perspective, and most important, an understanding of what is relevant now with regard to this subject.

Most of what it takes to sell successfully in the C-suite is timeless.  Deep knowledge of the customer’s business from an operations and financial perspective and a strong value proposition are two cornerstones.  Bistritz and Read provide all the tools you’ll need, especially the Value Proposition Worksheet (in the Appendix).

Understand, this is not just another “book about selling high.”  I know.  I’ve read most of them.  This gives you the background, understanding, strategies, tactics, tools, incentive, motivation, case studies, and step-by-step instructions for how to gain and maintain access to the C-suite.  It’s all there for you and your team.  The question is are you willing to do what it takes?

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

A salesperson’s business networks are only of some value.  Certainly not as much value as many candidates would like their interviewers to believe.

In my experience, a candidate’s business network is only one component of their overall Personal Capital.  Their experience, domain/industry expertise, business savvy, presence and charisma, communication and relationship-building skills, value delivered to customers and clients, and other factors all contribute to the overall potential productivity of the candidate.  The network is just a part.

If you break down that part—the candidate’s business network—into its many component categories, you’ll start to get a sense for where the misunderstanding around the Rolodex emanates.

Leaving out the candidate’s true personal relationships, you’ve got their former bosses, former subordinates, former colleagues, former customers (with many different roles and responsibilities at different organizational levels), former business partners, and then all of those peoples’  “present” counterparts.  For a salesperson with ten years of selling experience, you’d expect to see 300 to 500 people or, in some cases, many more.

Hirers want to know, “From contacts in their Rolodex, how many decision-makers, in my target market, can the candidate secure a meeting with?”   But that’s not the right question.  Here’s why: Depending on what your company sells, a candidate’s Rolodex may be worth little or even nothing.

For example, let’s say your company sells ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.  Your candidate comes out of SAP, a large competitor.  She’s been there for eight years, and did very well.  She tells you she’s got access to CFOs, COOs and senior executives at a hundred Fortune 500 companies.  Sounds great, right?  Are any of those companies going to unplug their SAP installations and replace them with yours?  Not likely.  In addition, you can expect that salesperson to have considerably less access carrying a business card with your company’s logo than she did when she represented SAP.  That’s just the way things are.

It’s very different for those selling professional services.  Before my lawyer retired, he jumped from firm to firm.  I stayed with him for the duration.  I was an entry in his Rolodex and a valuable one at that.

So, the question should be, “From contacts in their Rolodex, how many decision-makers, in my target market, who could conceivably acquire my product within one year, can the candidate secure a meeting with?”

I’m not suggesting you ignore the Rolodex issue.  Just look at it for what it really is in your unique situation.

I vividly remember the penalty for being too salesy. “Don’t give me a sales pitch,” said the most influential analyst covering our space. “Just answer my questions, and, by the way, you only have 10 minutes left.” Ouch!

I also remember timing a semi-annual analyst briefing so my company would be the last to get in front of an often-quoted analyst just before he left to present at his firm’s big client conference. There were literally hundreds of prospects in the audience. I took a seat in the first row and grinned when the analyst mentioned my company’s name twice. That endorsement was golden, leading to several critical meetings at the conference that directly resulted in new contracts several months later.

For a number of years my consulting firm engaged with companies for the purpose of preparing them for briefings with industry analyst firms. Our assertion was that industry analysts were a vendor’s best prospect. If a company managed to get an influential industry analyst to publish a positive review of them, they could count on a spate of quality leads as well as use of that document (or the very mention of it) as a powerful sales tool.

Mistakes Companies Make

What many of our clients didn’t realize at first was that industry analyst relations requires at least the same degree of planning and management as pursuing business with any strategic account. And it requires a subtle, consultative sell. We found that our naïve clients approached analysts as they did sales opportunities: forcefully and tactically. They would mistakenly send either junior people or the CEO to do the job. We often wound up building an account management process and training appropriate company management and marketing personnel on its use so they would be more effective, as a team, in pursuit of that positive analyst rating.

Today savvy CEOs and COOs see analyst relations management as a core competency for a CMO.  Proven skills in industry analyst relations have become increasingly important and are highly leveragable.

A View From the Other Side

Now that I’m running an industry analyst firm, I have confirmed, from a different perspective, what I already knew: To vendors, analysts are sales prospects. Here is a sampling of my daily activities. See if you agree.

• Receive many phone calls from vendors of all sizes
• Receive invitations to audit sales training classes of every type and in every location
• Receive invitations to breakfast seminars and web seminars
• Receive lots of autographed books by sales pundits, known and unknown
• Listen to the worst company and product pitches I have ever heard
• Listen to the best company and product pitches I have ever heard
• Regularly fend off massive doses of hype from vendors

The Bottom Line

Working with analysts is not a seat-of-the-pants activity. Reaping the rewards of an ongoing stream of positive research reports requires senior management support, competent industry analyst relations personnel, sufficient funding, a strategy, plenty of planning, effective selling and near-flawless execution.

Here is another post on the subject.