Global Account Selling Effectiveness

Paper on Global Account Selling Effectiveness Philip Squire

How a values based approach can secure then build global sustainable results?

In 2002 I conducted an interview with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of IMS Health, a large global pharmaceutical company. The subject of the interview was ‘How do you want to be sold to?’. The interview was videoed and structured around three topics – I wanted to understand what challenges a CIO operating within a global company faced; given these challenges, what qualities he looked for in a sales person? Finally what expectations he had of sales people?’ I asked him to provide me with examples of what sales people did that he liked and did not like. It was a productive interview but like many interviews that are conducted under the video camera, it is when the interview was over that the interviewee relaxes and opens up. He clearly felt strongly about what he was saying so I asked him almost as he was leaving my office, ‘What % of salespeople meet your expectations?’ To which he answered ‘90% of sales people are in my view a complete waste of time’. I decided to continue this line of questioning with the next two interviewees. My next interviewee was the Chief Technology Officer of one of world’s largest mobile phone operators. After his interview he said that in his view only 10% of sales people ‘get it’. Two out of the three initial interviewees were very critical of the performance of sales people.

So striking were these comments that I started an enquiry process to find out the extent to which sales people were failing in their attempts to make the right impression and why?

I was keen to explore how customers would respond to similar questions in other parts of the world – would responses differ from country to country - or from industry to industry? In collaboration with a number of clients I have been able to extend the reach of my research in this respect.

My research has since taken me to North America, Central America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia. These interviews took place over a period of 3 years. Most of the 40 plus interviews have been videoed. From these interviews I formed an opinion of ‘emerging competencies’ required of sales people to meet and exceed customer expectations.

I then invited a number of global account selling executives and global customer decision makers to a workshop in London in order to share the findings and take the dialogue onto another level. For this I enlisted the help of Professor George Yip, then based at London Business School, an authority on global marketing strategies, and who had also conducted some interesting research in the trends towards global account management. What started off as a list of emerging competencies developed into categorising these into internal facing competencies, customer facing competencies and to these I added ‘resiliency’, ‘constraints’ and ‘processes’. Consalia Ltd 21/09/06

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Global Account Selling Effectiveness

Table One: Attributes Required for Successful Global Account Selling

A number of new ideas are converging that have already made a significant if not dramatic change in my perspective and has altered the course of my research. Professor Jean McNif an expert on action research stressed the importance of highlighting values that one should aspire to (in selling to global accounts) and determine how these values can be validated by an appropriate cohort.

I have since gone through a number of thought processes about values. My first attempt at defining values was rather linear and so we reviewed the videos, this time looking for content on ‘values’. The more I looked for values the more I could see a new perspective. It’s rather like interpreting a painting in a very different way or fog clearing to reveal a new landscape! It made me question why have I not ‘seen this before’.

Consalia Ltd 21/09/06

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Global Account Selling Effectiveness

What impact will this research have?

Peter Kuhne’s book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ explains why I have not ‘seen this before’ and is a good basis for us all to reflect on how we learn.

Kuhne talks about ‘major turning points’ in scientific history associated with Copernicus, Newton, LaVoisier and Einstein and said that ‘each necessitated the community’s rejection of one- time honoured scientific theory in favour of another incompatible with it’. He also goes on to explain the concept of ‘normal science’. Normal science he says ‘means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements’. For years I have been working in the business of sales training and development and to a large extent my company’s practises of teaching have been based on those developed in the past. We may go through some finetuning of theories on selling techniques, but in essence I can see that I have been practising what Kuhne refers to as ‘normal science’ as it relates to my industry.

I have made few changes over the years in terms of how I teach selling techniques and how we practice sales. I can see now perhaps I have not been bold enough to question the very fundamentals of what we ‘teach’ and ‘do’ in sales. Is what I am doing from a training and development perspective creating maximum value for my customers? Has what I have done in the past for my clients created true value? As far as the global sales training community is concerned we can review the evidence of the research in two ways – if it is true that 90% of sales people don’t ‘get it’ as one interviewee put it – then perhaps we are missing some fundamental concept of what we should be training sales people to do? Or we can use the 90% statistic to go and sell the ‘same old stuff’. This raises the issue of professional ethics. The latter is not an option and certainly not one that will help to sustain and develop global account relationships.

Reading further in Peter Kuhne’s book he says that ‘paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practioners has come to recognise as acute.’ The fact that only 10% of sales people meet expectations of customers indicates there is an acute problem in the way that sales people sell to customers.

The very fact that there are few truly successful sales training companies in existence either locally or globally is perhaps another indicator that we have not been delivering enough value and that the techniques taught simply don’t work or are too difficult to evaluate in terms of ROI. The findings of the enquiry process will help to inform those in my industry and help them to realign their approach to the training and development of sales people.

Central to my research project is to understand the connection between value and values?

Customers will evaluate a supplier’s proposal on the perceived value they receive from the supplier – but to what extent do the values influence the customers decisions; how do values influence the degree to which a customer will help his supplier win the deal?

So where do I start?...

I revert back to my research data to search for clarity. It is interesting to note not only what the interviewees said but also to observe the passion behind their comments. I remind myself that Consalia Ltd 21/09/06

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Global Account Selling Effectiveness

those interviewed are often working at the highest levels in a company, they have taken time out of their busy schedules to be interviewed by me and to go on record saying how they want to be sold to. In describing what they like and dislike about sales people they refer in many instances to values.

In a relationship between a supplier and a customer where there is a misalignment in terms of values, contracts are not signed and relationships end. As one interviewee said ...supplier and customer relationships are like a marriage – ‘where there is no trust the marriage ends’.

Another said ‘don’t give me the bullshit about yours being the best of breed, its what the business requires that is the most important’.. he later goes onto to say ‘if I ever find you are keeping suppliers away then that’s it, you destroy the trust that’s the end of the relationship’.

Here you can see the connection between ‘value’ and ‘values’ – ‘what the business requires being’ the value and ‘trust’ relating to values. It’s so interesting to look at these two words value and values. I find myself questioning how often in a sales training workshop is there any reference to values and then a link made to value. Type in the word in Google ‘values based approach to selling’ and you will have no direct hit.

I have within the last month redefined what a ‘values based approach to developing and sustaining global relationships’ might look like. As you can see from this second reiteration, my ideas have moved on. In the centre of the circle is the client – I now list the ‘critical values’ based on observations made on the interviews that the client wants. From these values I am now able to list the behaviours and actions required to demonstrate the values. This provides a framework for judgement and validation. I am also interested to test whether these values apply in countries where cultures differ. My sense is that values are more easily transferred than technique. For example respect is a high impact value in both Europe and Japan but the technique of earning respect is very different.

Table Two: Values Misalignment – a source of tension

Two important aspects of my work enable me to evaluate the outcomes of my research on which judgement can be made: my role as a coach to my client’s global sales team and my role as CEO of Consalia.

Consalia Ltd 21/09/06

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Global Account Selling Effectiveness

My role as a coach to my client’s global sales teams I have a role as a coach to sales teams who are involved in major bid pursuits.

I am currently working with the bid pursuit teams of one of the world’s largest technology companies. These teams are involved in securing large outsourcing deals with a minimum value of $50 million – the largest being $5 billion. By their very size most of these projects are with companies who are global. My role is to facilitate and coach the team towards creating winning value propositions. The emphasis is on creativity in the deal making process and links with the values ‘personal innovation’ and ‘client centricity’ from Table Two. This project started in March 2006 - so far we have led 9 workshops with 9 different teams. Already a number of the deals have been won and success attributed to our ‘Winning Value Proposition’ programme.

My role as CEO of Consalia In March 2006 a new joint venture between four well established consulting companies was formed. This has involved us in recruitment, developing our global vision and establishing a new global brand identity. Consalia is a unique opportunity to integrate into our strategy the principles that we believe are important for global account selling effectiveness. Taking a holistic approach will be important in creating a values based approach. Already we have started to develop a values based approach in our corporate messages – this can be seen in our corporate brochure where we have a section on ‘values’. We have started to work on redefining our training programmes to reflect how a values based approach might influence how we run training and development assignments. We have also given consideration to the profile of global account manager and what profile we need to recruit into our business if we are to be successful. As our intent is to practice what we preach we are recruiting sales people who reflect those values that we believe are important. It also affects product development, validation and certification of trainers who are responsible for implementing a values based training approach.

Academic alignments: I have worked with David Hennessy of Babson University USA and George Yip of Cap Gemini. They have provided insights that have been helpful in shaping my ideas.

Consalia Ltd 21/09/06

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Global Account Selling Effectiveness