What You Can Learn From Your Sales Team

One of the most readily available sources of information about your company's products, position, and competition is your sales team. Yet many fail to tap this resource.

Sure, we may ask on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis about what deals are working, how the numbers are lining up, and or how many customers in a key segment the sales team is seeing. But do we also take the time to ask the sales team about how our products could be enhanced, how our customer service can be improved, or how our response time could be shortened?

A common response to this question I've gotten over the years is usually something like, "Ask our sales team, why would we do that? All they are going to do is complain about our [fill in the blank]". Yet, outside of speaking directly with your customers, your sales team has day to day first hand knowledge of what is happening in the market. Especially in resource constrained companies, the sales team is a quick and inexpensive source of market knowledge.

Consider innovation and product development. Every day your sales team talks to customers about the perceived benefits of your products and handles objections about your products' perceived deficiencies. This is why in product innovation teams I lead, talking with the sales team to get their view of the world is one of the key actions at the front end of the development process. An added benefit is that they are a part of the process for products they will be asked to sell.

Get Going.

I suggest bringing a group of sales people together if possible. As they warm up they will begin to interact, build, and even feed off of each other. Like a classic brainstorming session, one idea begets another and so on and so on. If feasible, have your current product available for the group to touch, feel, and comment about.

• Look for trends in comments: I like to say that one comment is an incident, two are a coincident, three are a pattern, and four are a trend. In qualitative research like this, look for recurring themes and issues, particularly if they come from different geographic parts of your market.

• What benefits do they sell: What are the top benefits of your product that each sells? Though specific product features will be discussed, the benefits are important. This helps break the developers out being focused on product features and instead focus on what the product does for the customer.

• What do you have to defend: Though this creates the slippery slope for the session to devolve into non-product issues, try to keep the group focused on the product itself. The goal is to find the vulnerable areas of the product that customers or the competition bring up.

• Understand the bias of the participants: Many times, the most recent deals that were lost or won may cloud the comments. As a facilitator, probe beyond the initial comments. You may ask, "who else is running into this issue?" or "how often do you see that?"

• Be ready to talk about non-product issues: This is nearly inevitable. Comments on quality, lead time, turnaround time, support, and more will come up whether you want them to or not. Plan for it. Depending on the group dynamics, set aside time either before or after the product session to discuss the non-product improvements. You may be surprised at the opportunities that are uncovered.

• What price means: Price may not always bubble up, but if it does you need to be ready. As you probe, the issue will not be price, the issue will be the perceived value of your product & service offering versus the perceived value of your competition. There may be legitimate issues that are product driven, but there may also be an opportunity for sales training as well.

As a next step, take a look at where your company's next products are in the product innovation process. Have you tapped your sales team's knowledge? If not, how do you bring them into the innovation cycle?

What You Can Learn From Your Customers

While you have been playing by the rules that made your company successful, your competition has rewritten the rule book.

While you have been resting on your laurels, your competition has been moving forward.

While you have been explaining or defending your company's actions to your customers, your competition has been asking them "How do we improve?"

"How quickly we forget how swiftly the competitive landscape can change."

I was reminded of this recently. We had been viewing a key customer through the prism of what had made us successful in the past, failing to recognize that our competition had been deliberately and methodically chipping away at our position. While we played by the old set of rules, a new rule book had been written.

The silver lining is that this has served as a wake up call, an opportunity to reflect and challenge some long held beliefs. I am reminded of the book "Who Moved My Cheese?". We had forgotten to smell the cheese to see if it had gotten stale.

The good news is that your top customers are a tremendous source of information about changes in the competive landscape. They know you, they know your competition, and they can provide a snapshot of how you, your team, and your company stack up. By engaging your top customers as a litmus test of your company's performance, in addition to a source of revenue, you will gain an ongoing understanding of issues that will eventually affect your revenue.

There are six performance areas to consider probing with your top customers. These also happen to align closely with the broader strategic pillars your company may be using:

1. Quality - how does your product and service quality compare to others that they purchase?
2. Innovation - how innovative have you been in developing and bringing forth new product or service improvements? What issues does your customer have that you may be able to solve... and that could be offered to others?
3. Responsiveness - how well are your responding to the needs of this customer compared to the other companies they use?
4. Ease of Doing Business - you may think that your company is easy to work with, what does your customer say when compared to your competition? If they had a choice, who would they prefer and why?
5. After Sales Support - how are you doing versus your competition in supporting your customer after the purchase with service, warranty, parts, training, or whatever else is important to them? Is this an opportunity to create separation from the competition?
6. Understanding Your Customer - Does your customer perceive that you understand what is important to them, where they are going and how you can help them get there? How do you compare to their other suppliers?

These are simple questions that we can quickly forget to ask. And then quickly find that our competitive landscape has changed.

Innovation Evangelists - 5 Common Traits

Innovation has become more important than ever as companies look to separate themselves in a business environment that has changed dramatically over the past 18 months.

Customer buying habits have changed, expansion plans may have turned to retrenchment, struggling competitors compete by slashing prices, and suppliers may be spending more time in front of a bankruptcy judge than your purchasing team.

As I have stated before, innovation is a key strategic pillar to any successful organization, albeit product development, R&D, process improvement, or fostering an innovation mindset in the corporate culture. For innovation to take root, particularly in mid-sized companies, Innovation Evangelists are needed.

These Innovation Evangelists may come from different areas of the organization, but they all share five common traits:

1. Passion: Innovation Evangelists have an absolute passion about the need to change, to challenge the status quo, and to move the organization forward


2. Big Picture Perspective: Innovation Evangelists can see the larger game board of the industry and can pinpoint significant changes that will affect the company's position in the market


3. Street Level Execution: Innovation Evangelists not only see the big picture, but understand how to bring those changes into specific projects that will lead to change. They have the ability to connect the dots of various projects and see how they collectively affect the larger strategic goal


4. Corporate Persuasion: Innovation Evangelists have the position and persuasion in the organization to bring together a coalition of players to get things done. They are respected, people want to follow them, and they can therefore turn their passion into corporate action


5. Action Oriented: Innovation Evangelists ultimately get things done. They drive the need to move a company forward, the identification of key projects that will meet this goal, and the allocation of the resources to make these projects successful

Who are the passionate Innovation Evangelists in your organization? How well is your organization looking at the larger industry game board and developing the projects to move forward? And what actions are being taken to achieve your company's larger strategic goals?

Marketing & Engineering: Two Creative Sides Of The Coin

You'd think that they'd mix like oil and water.

One very rational and left brained. One working with emotions, feelings and their right brain. One analyzing black and white data. One working with perceptions. An engineer and a marketer, couldn't be more different, huh?

Actually I found that engineers and marketing professionals are very similar in one critical area: creativity. Though each may come at the problem from a very different starting point, both can look outside of conventional thinking and come up with creative, mold breaking ideas.

One of the many fun things about working for mid-sized companies is the nearly forced collaboration among various parts of the organization. Most mid-sized companies are not yet so expansive that the potential functional silos/haystacks/castles/fortresses (well you get the idea) have not completely taken root. This allows an environment for cross functional teams to work together and thrive.

There is nothing like a passionate marketing product manager working with a passionate design engineer on a new product or line extension. Each will come at the initiative from a completely different angle. Put both the rational and emotional, data based and perception based, left and right brains of engineering and marketing together, and the collective results can be a truly innovative new product for your company. I have personally seen this work on everything from software to storage systems.

So how is your organization doing? Do your engineers and marketing folks collaborate on new products? If not, what would be the product line they could address and what are the first three steps to getting the project rolling?

The Iron Triangle: Sales, Marketing, Product Development

Innovation is one of the key strategic pillars in any organization. To keep moving forward, companies must have a stream of new and improved product offerings for their existing and future customers.

The danger is when product development begins to take on a Field of Dreams vibe, "if we build it they will buy." The wrong product is created, the market rejects it, countless hours and dollars are wasted, and the organization is left without much to show for all their hard work.

This is particularly tough in companies with revenue from $50 to $500 million because they have the resources to place only a few solid bets. Having been around new product development all of my career - even the summer between my first and second year of graduate school was spent developing and launching a new piece of cleaning equipment for a small manufacturer in Oklahoma - I suggest that you can increase your chance of success by using the iron triangle of a Marketing, Sales, and Product Development alliance.

"Yeah, we already ask Sales what they want and then when we're all done we give the new thing to the Marketing folks so they can make it look good," you may be thinking. This is not what I am talking about.

Having spent time in all three camps, there is absolute value to bringing together key players of the Sales, Marketing, and Product Development groups to work together on your next big thing. They should all be on the same page in terms of goals and milestones, then dedicate resources from their respective areas to ensure success of the product development, testing, and launch process.

I value the collaborative nature of a cross functional team in terms of the perspective each member brings to the conference table. Why just today, during a team discussion about improving a product, an engineer asked a technical question that ultimately led the sales and marketing folks down a path of positioning the product differently with an important customer niche. Now that's collaboration!

Think about the value each brings. Sales should have a good idea where you are missing the boat with the market or with a product. Marketing should have a good idea of what will trip the trigger of target customers and how to do that. The engineers in Product Development should have a good idea about what is feasible to create under a given set of constraints.

Consider your organization. How is product development handled? Do you have a stream of new products in the pipeline? Do you even have a pipeline? As a starter, might I suggest taking a few minutes to sit down with the heads of your Marketing, Sales, and Product Development teams and ask the group a simple question: "In 12 months, what should we be introducing into our market, and what three steps should we take to get the ball rolling?"

A few minutes may turn into hours of discussion.

Sales & Marketing - A Beautiful Friendship

There is a scene at the very end of Casablanca in which Rick (Humphrey Bogart) looks to his former adversary Louis (Claude Rains) and says, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" as they walk into the night fog.

Rick and Louis, though at loggerheads during most of the movie, find that in the end they have the same shared sense of purpose. Much like Sales and Marketing teams have the same shared sense of purpose - drive top line revenue.

The problem is that both groups tend to have very different views as to the best way of achieving this goal, leading to behavior that is potentially non-productive to down right destructive. Sales feels that the folks in Marketing don't understand what actually happens in the real day-to-day world with customers, while Marketing feels Sales doesn't understand their work or properly use the tools they've developed.

I have seen this dynamic play out in every organization I've worked with. One of my first experiences was during a sales management course at Emory where two earnest twenty something MBA students, one having worked in sales at P&G and the other in P&G's brand management, got into a very heated discussion about who was better equipped to market and sell toilet paper!

It does not have to be this way. Marketing and Sales are two sides of the same coin and to be effective each must respect and work with the other. In most mid-sized companies, the staffing and resources are constrained so there simply isn't room for friction between the two groups.

Don't get me wrong, healthy discussion and disagreement are part of the deal. But if both groups agree on the ultimate goals, then the discussion will be about how we get there, not where we are going.

I'll never forget a comment by the newly hired VP of Operations at a former company who observed how I, then a Marketing Manager, and our National Sales Manager interacted. He was trying to play us off each other and finally said, "What are you two doing getting along? I thought sales and marketing people aren't suppose to like each other!"

Save yourself unneeded heartburn. Before the week is out, sit down with your counter part in sales or marketing and go over both your priority lists. Are the two of you on the same page? Is marketing providing the leads and support that sales needs? Is sales providing the customer feedback and market intelligence that marketing needs to make better decisions? Do you both have mutual plans being executed that will lead to more revenue?

Use this dicussion as an opportunity for the beginning of a beautiful business friendship.