I was speaking recently at a conference on Sales 2.0 tools.  During the coffee break after my session I ended up in a conversation about sales enablement and sales playbooks. The conversation got derailed for a while as one particularly active participant wanted to debate the role of mobile and cloud technologies in the future of sales professionals. Seriously? I am not sure I understand how anyone would feel the need to ask that question. In my opinion mobile and cloud are as certain a part of our future as death and taxes – but maybe that’s just me.  Anyway, I am getting somewhat off the topic.  I say ‘somewhat’ only because the sales playbook discussion took a turn, and the debate centered on whether it was essential that a sales playbook was integrated with a company’s CRM.  (As you may know, we have spent a lot of time on this because of the work we do with Dealmaker Smart Sales Playbook.)

Wasn’t it ok to have a defined playbook in a PDF could be linked to from a sales opportunity record?

Well, no!

For me that is almost the same as asking if it would be ok to have all of the contacts for an opportunity in a spreadsheet ‘linked’ to the opportunity record in the CRM.   It just doesn’t make any sense.

There are many facets to Sales Playbooks in general and this topic in particular – but I have addressed here the two most important that you should consider as it pertains to making sure that your sales playbook and your CRM system work optimally together.

1. Integration of Sales Playbook with the CRM System

This one should be a ‘no-brainer’.  Let’s say you use Salesforce as your CRM.  If that is the case, you are already asking your sales team to enter their opportunity information into Salesforce. If that is where your opportunity information is held, then that is where your playbook should be.  It must integrate tightly with the CRM system so when the sales person works with an opportunity, the playbook will always be present, just where it needs to be.  That way the playbook (if it is smart enough) can react to the stages of the sale, the attributes of the opportunity, like the size of the deal, or the products included in the opportunity record to present the right playbook for that opportunity.

But not all integrations are created equal. If you are on Salesforce, then the playbook will benefit hugely if it is ‘native’ on the Salesforce Platform.  Unlike other solutions that are linked to Salesforce, or just lightly integrated, this means that your data resides in the Salesforce Cloud, with the same security as Saleforce, the same performance as Salesforce, and all of the data captured within the playbook is inherently accessible to Salesforce reports, dashboards, and other applications. You do not have to worry about the security of a third party Cloud, the data transfer issues that occur with non-native solutions, or the reliability of a third party hosting infrastructure.

Complete integration with your CRM delivers the  optimum experience for the sales person, and provides sales managers with greater flexibility on how they view the data in the context of the rest of the business.  It is important.

2. Informs Sales Forecast Visibility

Salespeople spend about 2.5 hours each week on sales forecasting, and for most companies, the accuracy of sales forecasts leave a lot to be desired. In fact, based on recent research; companies who do not define and effectively execute a sales process have inaccurate sales forecasts 71% of the time! When success or failure is usually measured in margins far less than 25% – these forecasts are truly worthless. The good news though is that there can be a very strong causal connection between sales process and forecast accuracy.  In that same research study, it emerged that companies who did define and execute their sales process well reduced the level of inaccuracy to 33%.  That is a 200% increase in sales forecast accuracy.

To maximize the impact of your sales playbook on the accuracy of your sales forecast, it must be integrated with the CRM and you should consider.

• Does the sales playbook incorporate intelligence that objectively monitors  or manages the close date of the sale? that is in the CRM? If you have built in the sales best practices, and your sales playbook can learn about the rhythm of your business, then it should be smart enough to help predict the close date of the opportunity, and identify for the sales person the difference between their opinion of when the deal will close, and a projected close date based on past behavior of winning sales cycle.

• Does the sales playbook provide the sales manager with insight into deal vulnerabilities and risks in the forecast? It should be able to answer these very important questions: What’s in the forecast?  Are any of the reps counting on unusually large deals to make the quarter? Are all deals being worked? What’s closed? What’s projected? Which deals are moving quickly, and where are the opportunities that are stalled?

Your sales playbook when integrated with the CRM should help you to give those 2.5 hours back to the sales person, improve the accuracy of the forecast for each opportunity, and provide the sales manager with insight into the factors that will help her understand what she needs to do to make or exceed the quota for the team.

(Disclosure: My company, The TAS Group, is in the business of helping companies increase sales velocity using Dealmaker Smart Sales Playbook integrated with Salesforce.com.)

At The TAS Group, we just recently completed a global study of sales performance.  The full report will probably be available by late April.  If you want a copy email me ddaly (at) the tasgroup (dot) com.

The statistics are pretty revealing – so I thought I would share them with you now.

1. 33% of sales people made quota in the last reporting period

2. Only 52% of sales people say they can access the key players for a sale

3. 39% of sales professionals say they are not able to effectively uncover customer problems, and

4. 35% struggle with designing customer focused solutions

5. 59% of sales close as originally forecasted

6. Sales forecast accuracy jumps to 76% when sales methodology is applied well

7. When the Sales function contributes to company strategy, quota attainment is 15% higher than when Sales is not involved

8. Quota attainment is 25% higher when Sales and Marketing are aligned, and

9. Win Rate is 15% higher when Sales and Marketing work well together

10. 59% of sales reps are good at opportunity qualification

11. 32% of sales professionals do not develop competitive strategies for their opportunities

12. When competitive positioning is part of a company’s sales strategy, revenue increases by 30%

13. 44% of reps are able to maximize the value of a sales opportunity

14. Only 36% can maximize the value of their key accounts

15. Salesforce.com has the highest % of CRM users with adoption > 50%

16. TAS has the highest % of methodology users with adoption > 50% (We are very happy about this!)

17. When methodology is integrated with CRM sales teams are 35% more likely to achieve average quota over 75% (As you know this has been my mantra for a long time!)

18. The #1 reason why sales methodology is not used is that only some people use it.

19. 60% of companies use a defined sales process

20. Companies are 33% more likely to achieve average quota over 75% if they use a sales process.

We have analyzed all the data that we gathered – and it was a lot – and some of the insights are fascinating.  We are looking forward to getting this finished and published to share.

As I mentioned above – If you want a copy email me ddaly (at) the tasgroup (dot) com.

There has been a lot a debate among the sales training / sales enablement community about The Challenger Sale from CEB’s Sales Executive Council.  Some of it has been cogent and balanced, but unfortunately a lot has been mud-slinging and poorly articulated or uninformed specious commentary that does not reflect well on the sales training industry. Most of the latter type has, probably predictably, come from those who might have good reason to be threatened by the seeming ubiquity or pervasiveness of TCS.  On the other hand, where measured arguments have been put forward, it seems that these originate more often from users, practitioners, or observers who acknowledge the value of TCS while wondering about its place in an overall sales eco-system.

I have read commentary from Linda Richardson, HRChally, Jonathan Farrington, Dave Stein, Tamara Schenk, Solution Selling, and others, and you can look at the links and judge for yourself who is engaging in productive debate, who is posturing to protect their own patch, and who is being downright unprofessional.   Methinks the latter doth protest too much!

Most of the anti-Challenger rhetoric seems to rail primarily against how the Sales Executive Council has presented Challenger to the market, and less about the substance of the TCS model, or the research behind its findings.  Many of the commentators take umbridge at SEC’s positioning of the findings as being new or noteworthy.  “There is nothing new or unique here” is a common cant.  Well, clearly that is not true: Otherwise TCS would not have captured the attention that is has, resonated as strongly with the marketplace, or evoked such a – sometimes vitriolic – response from those who feel threatened by it.

At The TAS Group, we faced similar criticism from some of the traditional sales training players when we introduced Dealmaker to the market.  We presented a view that effective adoption of methodology could only happen when supported by intelligent software and integrated into the daily workflow of the sales professional by combining the application of methodology with usage of the CRM. We were subsequently positioned by our competitors as only focused on technology, and we were questioned by the analysts as how we could maintain deep research in methodology and technology at the same time.  Well, that was six years ago, and the evidence suggests that we were not as misguided as some would have thought.   Now, although not everyone has the depth of technology resources that we do, everyone recognizes the need for software as an integral part of a sales performance system.  And, the advancements we have made in methodology during that time has served our customers very well.

I don’t think TCS is either perfect or a complete sales system, or a one-size-fits-all solution; nor do I believe that the folks at the Sales Executive Council think so either.  (By the way, I am struck by the fact that it is evident that many of those who are criticizing TCS had not spoken to the SEC before they expressed their views.)  A complete sales performance system requires everything from market planning to territory segmentation, account stratification, account management, opportunity management and sales process, all supported by skills and technology.

But TCS has a number of undeniable strengths.  It has done a better job of highlighting the need for greater sales and marketing alignment than many of its forerunners.  (I have written about that problem here, here, here, here, here, and here.)  With a level of clarity all too rarely seen in the industry, it has debunked the myth of the Relationship seller.  Where others represent it as arrogant that a sales person should bring insight, or being able to ‘teach’ the customer as being arrogant, I see it as a customer focused approach, and an acknowledgement that buyers are more informed and therefore the sales person has to prepare much more diligently.  It demands that the sales person work hard to understand their customer and the customer’s industry, and requires a level of intellectual capital that all customers should look for from their suppliers.   In my opinion, any effective sales person should be able to bring insights to her customer of what has worked elsewhere.  I think that is table stakes.

Through its membership community, SEC has an effective petri dish to test its approaches, before unleashing them on the market.  Their heritage in research is a matter of fact – not of opinion. While they still have a way to go, I would have hoped that constructive inclusion, a recognition of how TCS complements other methodologies, would have been the response, but sadly …

More importantly though, the success of Challenger – and it is unquestionably successful – points to a failure of traditional providers, particularly those who focus on sales skills.  The fact that TCS has been so quickly embraced points to a deficiency in the alternatives.  Otherwise why would there be a gap in the market for SEC?

Make no mistake.  SEC has done a remarkable job of positioning TCS in the market, and indeed is using the principles espoused by Dixon and Adamson in their book to effectively challenge the status quo.  Something is working – and the response of the detractors only validates the approach.

I spoke at InsideView’s Insider Summit meeting in March 2012. The topic was about sales metrics that you might measure to calculate your sales velocity – the revenue you can achieve every day – and some ideas about what you might do to improve your sales velocity, and also achieve accurate sales forecasts.

The video has been edited to remove the Q&A and to make some of the slides easier to see. Click play to view the video. It runs about 25 minutes.

This is my first video blog, and I’d welcome any comments on the format, or comments or questions on the content.

It’s been too long since I’ve posted here. We’ve been a little busy with the new release of Dealmaker (big news – now it’s fully iPad enabled); we recently launched a new website; just completed the deployment of Dealmaker to one of the world’s largest companies, and signed a very significant partnership with a global powerhouse. You will hear more about that soon.

But it is time to get back to the blog.

The big news in the mobile market in March was the launch of the new iPad. Notwithstanding the fact Apple’s new tablet is a bit lacking in the nomenclature department – I wish they had called it the iPad SJ, as was rumored – the iPad is the dominant tablet in the enterprise, boasting a 96% share of this important market, and smart mobile devices are beginning to outsell laptops. In Tim Cook’s words, we are in a post-pc era.

I’ve been using an iPad pretty extensively since the first one came out.  But in anticipation of our new iPad version of Dealmaker, I made a concerted effort to shut down the laptop and use the iPad as frequently as I could.  I used it to navigate and update Dealmaker, use our CRM, read and compose email, browse the web, write some blog posts, manage my calendar, and read books.

The iPad is extremely easy to use, and I needed to return to the laptop rarely. But as with all new ways of working, there are tips and tricks, or better ways to do a task, and there are new tasks that you can do that you would not have thought of before.  You can only learn these things over time.

Here are some of the lessons I have learned, and would suggest you might consider if you are using your iPad with a customer to demo a product, run a presentation, or just show some documents.

1. Keep It Clean: All those taps, swipes and pinches with greasy fingers smear your screen. It’s not hard to keep the iPad clean. A dirty screen shows the customer that you don’t really care too much about what they think.

2. Keep Work & Play Separate: Nearly everyone I know who uses an iPad for business will also use it for pleasure. In many cases the ‘work iPad’ is shared as the ‘family iPad’ and apps like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Scrabble and Monopoly inevitably appear on the iPad.  Accepting this reality, you need to separate the work apps from the home apps.  I’d recommend having the serious work apps on one or more screens and the home or fun apps on separate screens.

3. Lock the Screen Orientation: In most cases in a presentation you will want to display the screen in either portrait or landscape mode. It is distracting if your iPad keeps rotating the screen orientation as you move it around. Pick the orientation you need and use the screen lock to keep it in place.  (This is usually accomplished by flicking the switch on the top-right beside the volume buttons.

4. Open Multiple Apps: If you want to show your customer content from more than one app, you should open the apps before you start your meeting.  Press the Home button twice and you can access the apps that are open and easily switch back and forth between them.  You should of course shut down any apps that you don’t plan to use in the meeting.

5. Using Safari: If you’re planning on displaying content from the web, you will almost certainly use Safari to access it.  (There are other browsers available from the AppStore.)  Safari’s default behavior is to keep multiple tabs open at any time and you can use that to navigate multiple websites quickly if you set it up beforehand. You should also make sure that you close any sites that are not part of what you want to show.

6. Content on the iPad: The easiest way to get content on your iPad is to email it to yourself.  Be prepared for some problems if the incoming document is Word, PowerPoint or Excel.  Even if you have installed Pages, Keynote and Numbers (the Apple Apps) on your iPad it is likely that when opening the document on the iPad you will see some font, layout, or graphic problems.  The simple answer if to create a PDF of the doc and email it to yourself.  In my experience this has always resulted in faithful reproduction.  Then you can open the PDF and store it in iBooks where you can build up a library of material.  (I am now using Keynote on both my laptop and iPad – but this PDF path was definitely the quick and easy way to get started.)

7. Don’t Pinch Too Hard: Because the iPad is really good at panning and zooming, and pinching and stretching, it can be tempting to do too much movement during your presentation.  Keep movement to a minimum to minimize the distraction.

8. Turn Off Notifications: When presenting on your laptop you don’t want your emails or Skype messages popping up on screen. It is the same with the iPad.  Make sure you have switched off any notifications that might appear on screen.

9. Passcode Lock: Keep it secure. Because it is so mobile, you are more likely to lose your iPad than your laptop. You will leave it in a restaurant, or misplace it under a stack of papers, or it might be stolen. If that happens you will at least want to know that your information is secure.  In Settings, turn on Passcode Lock and create a four-digit code.

10. Get the VGA Adaptor: If you want more than a couple of people to be able to see what is on your iPad you will need to connect to an external display device. To do so, you will need to get an appropriate adapter.  I use the $29 Apple VGA Adapter which plugs into the iPad on one end and the projector on the other.  It has worked well for me so far.  There are other options you can use like the $39 Apple Digital AV Adapter (for displays with HDMI inputs) – but the VGA adapter has done the job each time for me so far.

11. WiFi or Cellular: Wi-Fi is often faster than a cellular data network – but not always. If you need to be online during the meeting prepare before your meeting to determine which you are going to use. WiFi is usually preferable.  It is typically faster, and when you are connected to it you are not eating up all your data plan capacity.

12. Webinars: This is a problem area for me. I’ve tried Webex, GotoMeeting and Adobe Connect on my iPad and they each allow me to join a meeting as a participant.  I’ve not yet found a way to use my iPad in presenter mode on a webinar.  I’d love someone to tell me if they have found one.  (I’m not talking about the professional quality AV hardware solutions that I have seen available, but rather something that your average mobile worker can use.)

13. Buy Some Apps to Create: If you want to really get comfortable with the iPad, then you’re going to need to start creating some documents on it.  Purchase Pages, Keynote or Numbers and start using them. These are relatively cheap at $9.99 each. If you have a Mac you can also buy these apps on your Mac at $79 for the three – bundled together as iWork.  Alternatively you could purchase iMovie ($4.99) or iPhoto ($4.99) and unleash your creative side.  These two apps were released on March 7, 2012 with the launch of the new iPad, and they are truly fantastic.

The iPad is a joy to work with and hopefully there is something here that might be helpful to you.  I’d love to hear any thoughts or tips you have.

Now, if only someone could help with the webinar problem …