Author Archives: Jim Ninivaggi
About the Author
Jim Ninivaggi is Service Director, Sales Enablement Strategies, at SiriusDecisions. Jim’s focus is on helping to deliver data, knowledge and insight that our clients need to improve sales performance and drive ROI. Follow Jim on Twitter @jninivaggi.
“Fieldsourcing” Sales Content: The Benefits of Running a Content Collection Week
- 25th April 2013
The New Yorker magazine runs a popular weekly contest that invites readers to submit a clever caption for a single-frame cartoon drawn by a professional cartoonist. The magazine typically receives more than 5,000 submissions. The editors pick the top three, and readers then vote on their favorite (I was fortunate enough to be a finalist a couple of years ago). The magazine’s cartoonists have often remarked that the captions created by these amateurs are funnier than the ones they originally envisioned. Marketing and sales leaders know their field reps create their own mailers, presentations and sales tools; they’re just not sure what they’re doing, or why. This lack of knowledge means that some really great content goes unutilized, while some really bad content is being presented to buyers. Just as The New Yorker contest uses crowdsourcing, marketing and sales can run regular content collection weeks to “fieldsource” sales content from their reps and sales engineers.
Continue Reading....Game, Set and Match: What Tennis Can Teach Us About Sales Coaching
- 25th February 2013
When we think of great coaches (e.g. legendary football coach Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, women’s basketball coach Pat Summit of Tennessee), we typically imagine them pacing up and down the sidelines or court, yelling instructions to their players. During timeouts, they gather their players to discuss strategy and plays. They are active participants in the game, getting almost as much television coverage as their players! This is not the case, however, in tennis. It is illegal to coach a tennis player during a match (though some coaches try to skirt this rule by using hand signals). You don't see a tennis coach pacing the sidelines, calling the shots or huddling with their player to discuss strategy during a break.
Continue Reading....Sales Process, Methodologies, Models and Hybrids
- 1st February 2013
This Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens will compete in the Super Bowl to determine the American football championship. While the respective coaches may come from the same family (Jim Harbaugh is the head coach of the 49ers while his brother John leads the Ravens), they deploy very different offensive systems. The 49ers use an offensive system called the “Pistol,” which includes many plays where the quarterback may be required to run with the ball. The Ravens utilize the “Vertical” offense, where the focus is on having the quarterback pass the football in precisely timed patterns to his receivers. These different offensive systems made me think of a common question I receive from our sales enablement clients. There seems to be some confusion as to the difference between sales process, sales methodology, and sales models – and often our enablement clients use them interchangeably. At the risk of overusing yet another sports analogy in sales, here’s how football can help explain the difference.
Continue Reading....Sales Content: Time to Purge
- 11th December 2012
I’m in the process of moving out of the house my family and I have lived in for the past 16 years. With our kids off to college, it’s time to downsize our “empty nest.” There’s a great lesson here for any sales organization that’s planning to move its content to a new portal in the upcoming year. Like a hoarder unwilling to part with any possession, many marketing and sales organizations feel compelled to keep every piece of content ever created (one client shared that they once had 50,000 pieces of content stored on their sales portals). The results are predictable: Salespeople get frustrated when they can’t find what they need searching through all that clutter. Marketers also become frustrated when reps don't use the content they’ve spent so much time creating.
Continue Reading....2013: The Year of the First-Line Sales Manager
- 28th November 2012
Here in the United States, much of the post-election news coverage is focused on the so-called “fiscal cliff” we are fast approaching. At the end of this year, unless action is taken, certain federal tax rates will rise, while several budget items will be slashed. No matter who they voted for, most Americans would agree that our current fiscal situation of spending well above our means is not sustainable. How we are working simply is not working – and unless we change, we can expect more of the same in future years. One can take a similar view when it comes to first-line sales managers in b-to-b sales organizations. We call it the first-line sales manager paradox: While most sales leaders agree that it is one of the most important roles (if not THE most important role), the first-line sales manager is also the role that receives the least support, structure and guidance. Indeed, during a recent webcast we conducted on building a sales management system, when asked to describe the hiring and onboarding process for first-line sales managers, 65 percent of attendees responded with “We promote our best reps and hope for the best.”
Continue Reading....Don’t Negotiate Until You’re Done Selling
- 29th October 2012
When the b-to-b buyer comes to the end of the buying journey looking for a price concession or a change in delivery terms, a seller’s first instinct is to negotiate when it should be to keep selling. The job of the salesperson is to “reframe” the buyer’s perspective away from the negative aspects they are consumed by, and remind them of the positive aspects the buyer has already agreed are valuable. Ask the buyer whether the positive aspects of the solution outweigh the negative (in the case of our home buyers, turning their focus to why they wanted the house in the first place). Classic value-oriented selling. One of the best lessons I learned early in my sales career was that four criteria need to be in place before I can be ready to negotiate.
Continue Reading....It’s Never Fully Qualified Until You Close
- 18th October 2012
You’re working the big deal, spending weeks or months in pursuit of the close. The buyer is giving you all the right signals; you are told you are a finalist – or even the vendor of choice. You move the deal diligently through your sales force automation opportunity system, reporting the forecasted revenue. The big day arrives when you are expecting the call to let you know that you’ve won the business, and … Bang. You find out the deal was never really yours to win.
Continue Reading....Sales Enablement: Love Your Reps
- 27th September 2012
A key finding of our recent study on the sales enablement function pointed out that the sales enablement function is still evolving and being defined, including who leads the function. I’d like to propose that those who lead it, whether they have a marketing, sales or finance background, should share one common trait: They need to love their salespeople. Enablement leaders need to understand that sales (like accounting, engineering or marketing) is a profession requiring skills, knowledge and behaviors, just like any other profession (indeed, there are now over 20 universities that offer programs and degrees in sales). Enablement leaders need to be internal advocates for their reps, and the profession of sales.
Continue Reading....Selling to the Middle
- 4th September 2012
It’s rare that a company starts its life focused on selling to the mid-market (which we’ll define as companies with $100 million to $500 million in revenue). Most start focused on the Fortune 500 – a market easy to define and quantify. But at some point, a company will look at the mid-market to maintain growth. Here are some tips and common mistakes to avoid in selling to the middle.
Continue Reading....Is Solution Selling Really Dead?
- 16th August 2012
For Baby Boomers (and even Gen Xers) who carried the bag earlier in our careers, those were the good old days of selling. All we needed to do was wait for buyers to come to us with their needs, ask them questions, align our offerings to meet their requirements and close the deal. It was so easy then. Or was it? If we’re to believe all the hype about the death of solution selling, I’ve just described the world of yesteryear’s salesperson. However, recent articles and blog posts positioning newer, provocation-based selling approaches have whitewashed, oversimplified and frankly misrepresented the history of solution selling. Here are some observations.
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