On August 27th, Forrester hosted the first Sales Enablement roundtable in the industry focused on addressing challenges related to profitable growth objectices for large enterprise technology companies.

Assembling a balanced group of sales and marketing executives, through one lens the session could have been viewed as an economic summit. Added together, the total revues of the participants exceeded $350 Billion. To put that into perspective, that would make our panel the 27th largest economy in the world right behind Greece, but ahead of Denmark. In attendance were representatives from the following global organizations: Accenture, Allen Systems Group, BearingPoint, BMC Software, CA, CSC, Dimension Data, Dun & Bradstreet, IBM, Kronos, Orange Business Services, Siemens, SunGard, Unisys, and Xerox.

During our session we talked about best practices, a cross functional framework to help galvanize product, marketing, and sales teams around customers, and how to create a more strategic sales enablement program.

However, most of our time together was invested in defining the problem. We reached unanimous consensus that current “random acts of enablement” are wasteful and do not have any real significant on sales performance. Problems with current approaches cited included:

Technology companies are under pressure to accelerate growth and improve margins. However, the enterprise accounts these vendors sell into are increasingly viewing their offerings as commodities.

Most enterprise technology vendors are feeling these pressures and in a response to the colliding tectonic forces of accelerating growth, improving margins, and differentiating in increasingly competitive markets, one common strategic imperative employed by most firms is to retool their sales organizations.

In most cases, management wants their sales people to become “trusted advisors” to c-level executives. Sales people are brought in and through a “corporate car wash” trained in a day or two how to gain access and influence major executives.

Does this approach lead to “trusted advisor” level sales people?

The industrial revolution happened over a period of about 200 years starting in the mid-1700’s and lasting to the mid-1900’s. The core pattern of this period was the application of mechanical methods to meet the needs of the many in a more scalable, cost-effective way. For example, the first industry to kick off the industrial revolution was textiles. In the early 1700’s all garments were made by hand. The wealthy could afford extremely high quality, comfortable, tailored, and expensive handmade garments. However, most people could not afford these clothes and had to make their own. The idea was to apply machines and water (later steam) power to produce many garments at much higher quality than home-made ones with an extremely high degree of consistency, but less quality than those created by the high-end, skilled tailors of the time. The result was a complete transformation of business and society.

Today’s Problem – Providing Your Customers with Valuable Information and Insight

Knowing they need their front line sales force to develop relationships with executives to gain access to bigger budgets and differentiate themselves from the 5 other players who can do similar things, many B2B companies are retooling their sales and marketing organizations to be more consultative in their selling approach. This is generally accompanied by another major objective to round out the product portfolio to offer more valuable stuff to these executives they want to build relationships with.

So, how are companies doing with this?

Not so well.

The Sales Leadership Council (a Corporate Executive Board service) in 2006 found that most consultative selling efforts were increasing the cost of sale at a greater rate than sales were growing. In fact, more than 20% of their clients were actually losing money due to their consultative sales effort - so much for expanding margins.

To me, this really comes into view when I speak with executives who are on the receiving end of these so called solution sales calls. We’ve known for ever that executives avoid spending time with sales people like my two year old avoids having his hair washed. Most executives admit they are meeting with a few more sales people than in the past, but their experience isn't that pleasant.

When your CEO asks, "Why haven't we realized the sales performance boosts we expected when we (insert investment of your choice)

...implemented our SFA system?
...trained our sales organization?
...launched our sales portal?"

How will you respond?

If you (and the CEO) thought that investment was "the answer" to improving sales performance, we have some bad news. There is no such thing as a sales effectiveness silver bullet.

While, there are many different types of organizations that claim they can help you improve your sales productivity, few of these solutions can offer measurable gains in productivity on their own. For example:

•CRM vendors argue that implementing their software will help you drive more business by providing better structure to the sales process and improving the accuracy of your forecasting.
•Sales training firms suggest that you can improve your sales fundamentals by teaching a common sales methodology and best practices.
•Market intelligence firms claim that better and more up-to-date information about market trends and your competitors' actions will do the trick.

However, companies that have implemented these solutions report that they are not realizing the desired impact of these investments.

General George Patton’s unparalleled ability to execute in WWII sometimes gets overshadowed by his colorful (and stupid) public relations. Because of his quick strike abilities, the Axis leaders feared him more than any other Allied general. What made him truly unique, and someone still studied in military academies throughout the world today, was his formula for success. Patton had a voracious appetite for history and believed that humanity already had a master inventory of all of the strategies and tactics for winning a battle. All one had to do was apply that knowledge to a given situation. His success can be summed up by his ability to model, map, and match.

You've heard it before — the seemingly endless "he said, she said" debate between sales and marketing. Many CEOs feel like they are counselors and could write John Gray's next relationship advice book: "Sales is from Mars, marketing is from Venus."

Clearly, the counseling approach isn't working; as the "divorce rate" between companies and their marketing leadership is extremely high — 75% of enterprise technology firms replaced their VPs of marketing between 2002 and 2003. Chief marketing officer (CMO) tenures, already on average much shorter than those of other CxOs, has dropped from 23.6 months to 23.2 months according to an article in Brandweek (“Length of CMO Tenure Continues to Decline”. http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10030...

By comparison:

1. CEOs average 44.4 months (91% longer),
2. CFOs last 39.4 months (70% longer),
3. CIOs lasted 36.4 months (57% longer).

In Rob Reiner’s 1984 “rockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap, one of the main characters, Nigel Tufnel, proclaims they are different than other bands because their speakers “go to ll.”

I cannot help but be reminded of good ole Nigel every time I talk to clients who are working on their value propositions. A few claims I’ve heard over the years:

1. “We are more scalable”
2. “We are truly global”
3. “We are more adaptive”

Translation? "We go to eleven".

I hear those claims and think to myself, “What prevents their competitors for saying the exact same thing?”

Almost every marketing organization I encounter seems to be making a major effort to differentiate or improve their value propositions.

So, what happens?

A bunch of people (mostly a blend of product or solutions people and marketers) have a series of meetings and wordsmith a set of ideas into a few paragraphs and then say, “If we can only get our sales force to deliver this message, we will outsell our competitors”.

Does this ever pan out? No.

B2B vendors are struggling to combat margin pressures that result from an increasing perception of commoditization in the market place. Many have concluded the most logical way to address this is to sell higher in the organization and become “trusted advisers” to more senior executives.

However, the feedback we receive from G2000 executives (the people these vendors are trying to sell to) paints a different picture.

Consider that:

* Executives consider fewer than 5% of their vendors to be strategic.
* The typical CXO does not meet with sales people.
* New efforts are in place to shield IT executives from vendor sales people.
* The overwhelming majority of IT executives (defined as the CIO or a direct report to a CIO) find sales people annoying and wasteful of their time.

As vendor sales organizations struggle to change their go-to-market strategies while addressing these realities, they run into many internal challenges, which are best summarized by the following question:

"Are you mounting a solution selling engine on a product selling chassis?"

Come on, admit it.

It’s what you think, isn’t it?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “our salespeople lack the skills or ability to (insert any of the following: cross-sell, sell higher, sell to value, get ahead of the RFP)” I would be a very rich person.

But are selling skills really the problem?

Most B2B companies today are moving to named account coverage models where a sales team has an assigned quota for revenue produced out of a given company or organization. Responsible for selling the entire product portfolio, the expectation here is that sales people will concentrate their efforts on a handful of targeted companies and grow them from $1M to $10M accounts. When it doesn’t happen, business leaders tell me the same thing, “we just don’t have the right people” or “our sales people just don’t get it”.

What’s lost in this calculus is the sheer mountain of information that sales people must manage and communicate to customers in a valuable way.

To illustrate this point, consider this example.